Original subtitles

The course of H .P. Lovecraft's life was altered by an unfortunate madness.

In April of 1893, his father, a commercial traveler from the vicinity of

was on business in Chicago.

It was there that Winfield Scott Lovecraft experienced the general

the insane.

Winfield's violent hallucinations would soon place him in Butler Hospital.

His troubled wife, Susan Phillips Lovecraft, was forced to return home to

family in Providence, Rhode Island.

With Susie was her two -year -old son, Howard Phillips Lovecraft.

Today, the man readers of weird fiction know as H .P. Lovecraft is ranked

alongside America's best writers.

He defined the themes and obsessions of 20th century

horror and as we chug on into the 21st century, it doesn't seem to be going

away. He let drop away all the trappings of what is called horror and he moved

into some narrative peculiar to himself.

He invented his own genre, really.

Lovecraft tells you...

about the scale of man in the cosmos.

So he is really the most articulate about saying there is an indifference

the ancient gods to man.

Lovecraft takes that and ups the ante to the cosmos.

If you can think of a kind of supernatural horror fiction, it's almost

that at some point in his career, Lovecraft applied himself to it. And

got it right, as he often did, nobody could beat him.

Cthulhu.

Azathoth.

Yog -Sothoth.

These are the unspeakable names of the old ones.

The very heart of Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos.

A loosely connected canon which has gone on to become one of literature's most

influential creations.

I don't know that Lovecraft ever sat down initially and went, I'm going to

a grand mythos.

I think that, yes, it begins and then everything else sort of fits in.

It's a very complex sort of inbreeding of mythologies and essentially what

the pitch would be that things much older than mankind, things much older

Earth, are gazing upon us with indifference.

and cruelty.

Those old ones were gone now, hidden in distant wastes and dark places all over

the world, until the time when the great priest Cthulhu, from his dark house in

the mighty city of R 'lyeh under the waters, should rise and bring the earth

again beneath his sway.

Instead of it being that there are, you know, demons coming from hell, there are

these weird tentacled creatures coming from other worlds.

into ours and that they have been banished and that they will return

regain what was once theirs the old ones are the universe the old ones are the

cosmos they're that force beyond us that we're incapable of controlling and

they're that force they're that they're the universe that is vaster than we can

ever comprehend prior to lovecraft if you read horror if you read ghost

you always have a vision of a world which is fundamentally hospitable God is

looking after you. God is looking after the good people.

Good people will probably survive horror stories or ghost stories or whatever.

Lovecraft redefined things. He took it away from the ghost story, away from the

Gothic, and into the vision of a malign world. The place

surrounded.

By evil, mad, horrible, monstrous things always trying to get in, who frankly

don't really care about her.

But what led an old -world xenophobic gentleman to write these tales of

abominations and cosmic gods?

Where bay and tranquil river blend, and leafy hillsides rise, the spires of

providence ascend against the ancient skies.

And in the narrow winding ways, the climb o 'er slope and crest, the magic

forgotten days may still be found to rest.

The Phillips House at 454 Angel Street.

was a vestige of old American values.

Lovecraft's family was very well -to -do, and I believe they considered

themselves to be of the Providence aristocracy. The Phillips line goes back

far in Providence history, all the way as early as the late 17th century.

The Lovecraft side originates in England. He could trace that all the way

to about the 15th century. There were Lovecrafts or Lovecrofts in Devon.

He was truly almost a Mayflower specimen preserved

in the formaldehyde of New England.

He was an Anglophile. He was a guy that definitely did not get laid much.

And a guy that was an alien amongst us in the sense that he was

not a very masculine child.

After Winfield's death from syphilis on July 19, 1898, Young Howard was all

Susie Lovecraft had left.

She mothered her child, incessantly.

So much so that she was known to make friends stoop when walking hand in hand

with her son, for fear his arm would be pulled from its socket.

Despite her over -attention, Susie Lovecraft's near -puritanical views

restrained any physical affections toward her son.

Lovecraft would later admit to his only wife that this form of mothering was

devastating to him.

His grandfather, Whipple Phillips, was a very impressive industrialist.

Lovecraft remembers Whipple telling him oral ghost stories at the age of four or

five.

He tutored him in a number of other ways, trying to take an interest in his

education.

In the attic was an immense library, presumably collected by his grandfather.

And Lovecraft went up there as a boy with a candle secretly and started

all these old books and fell in love with the 18th century.

Lovecraft is more than a product of his time. He's a product of a couple of

centuries earlier because he was born out of time.

One of the important things for the 18th century was the code of a gentleman, to

live as a gentleman with dignity and honesty and integrity.

He read the literature of the 18th and early 19th centuries and said, I want to

be like those people. I want to be like Alexander Pope, who wrote poetry just

for the love of it.

I've always had the subconscious feeling that everything since the 18th century

is unreal or illusory, a sort of... grotesque nightmare or caricature.

Lovecraft learned a lot in his grandfather's house.

In fact, all the learning that he had, I think, came from there.

His schooling was intermittent at best. Apparently, he had various nervous

maladies that kept him out of school.

This was a time before education was mandatory. You didn't have to send your

child to school if you didn't want to.

At the age of eight, he became filled with a burning love of chemistry.

Shortly thereafter, he discovered astronomy, which I think was an even

important influence. He says it was through astronomy that he gained a sense

the boundlessness of the universe and the insignificance of humanity within

cosmos.

There's a phrase that generally I only encounter it when reading or talking

people like paleontologists or geologists.

um the concept of deep time which is pretty alien to most people you know

people tend to think of of history in terms of years deep time is that time

before before the comprehension of man geological time is a way of thinking

about it where you're working on a time scale where you talk about things like

mountains are pushed up and erode continents shift species evolve and

extinct but it's not really something you can process humanity was limited the

earth which made humanity itself small and threatened and fragile so because

he was a threatened and fragile being himself he populated

that emptiness with monsters

frequent visits to the attic

gave susie the impression that her son was trying to hide from the world and

others that he was a vulnerable child

The relationship of Susie Lovecraft with her son was problematical at best.

Clearly she loved him, but I think because of what had happened to her

Lovecraft's father, who had died of syphilis, I think she developed some

love -hate relationship with Lovecraft, called him hideous, said to a neighbor

that he had a hideous face, and that's why he wouldn't go outdoors much.

Susie repeated these opinions enough times that her son actually grew to

them.

Insecurity mixed with classical tendencies segregated young Lovecraft

others his age.

But this solitary childhood only kindled his imagination.

I used to be tormented constantly with a peculiar type of recurrent nightmare in

which a monstrous race of entities called by me Night Gone.

You can snatch me up by the stomach and carry me off through infinite leagues of

black air over the towers of dead and horrible cities with vast aggregations

night black masonry embodying monstrous perversions of geometrical laws.

Feeding his taste for the macabre was the recent discovery of tales by Edgar

Allan Poe.

Lovecraft is the most significant descendant of Poe, and you can see that

heritage most clearly in those early stories that evoke effects such as those

Telltale Heart, say.

The Telltale Heart could have been written by Lovecraft.

He may have wanted to be a little like Edgar Allan Poe, but he went in a whole

different direction with his imagination.

Poe talked about how a short story should be, everything should be...

there to create one particular effect, whereas Lovecraft, I think, goes for

more sort of a bigger canvas somehow than Poe did.

In his teenage years, Lovecraft would attempt quite a few stories in the Poe

style.

Most, however, were destroyed by Lovecraft.

I think too many writers are too hard on themselves. It has to be said that, you

know, Lovecraft epitomizes this trend.

And actually, I think if there's one positive thing to be brought out from

other than he was a great writer, I think, you know, any writer who feels

about their own work should read Lovecraft's comments about his own work.

almost never has a good thing to say about his own work.

This may be a kind of version.

of what he perceived as good manners.

Because there's no doubt that he would have thought it very ill -mannered to

praise his own work.

I think that Lovecraft was full of insecurities at that time. He really

know what to pursue in terms of a career.

Maybe he didn't feel he needed a career, at least in terms of the money, because

he felt that money would always be there. But shortly thereafter, he

the money wasn't going to be there.

In 1904, Whipple Phillips was already suffering from poor investments in a

failed dam project.

The stress of it all no doubt contributed to his death on March 28th.

The house on Angel Street was sold.

The library that schooled Lovecraft for 12 years went with it.

He loved that place.

There he knew the only real security he ever had.

Even though it was only three blocks away, the new home Susie had picked for

son. was an unknown country.

Though high school would offer some enjoyment, Lovecraft was vexed by the

subjects that escaped him.

Lovecraft says he had a full -scale nervous breakdown.

We don't really know what that means. I personally believe that it was a result

of his discovery that his lack of knowledge or lack of proficiency in

mathematics prevented him from pursuing a career as an astronomer.

In the summer of 1908, he simply left school and never returned.

Lovecraft's reclusion would last from 1908 until 1917.

Judging from his letters, this breakdown had all the earmarks of a deep

depression.

I shunned all human society, deeming myself too much of a failure in life to

seen socially by those who had known me as a youth and had foolishly expected

great things of me.

Lovecraft himself was a pretty crazy person.

He was kind of nuts, wandering around.

I don't mean that, eccentric is a better word.

Even for his time, he must have been not only a recluse, but an oddity.

He would go out occasionally, apparently, and...

People saw him walking down the street in a raincoat with the flaps up to his

collar and looking straight ahead, not trying to make eye contact with anybody.

One activity that endured through this period was his reading.

This exposed Lovecraft to the amateur pulp magazines that would one day be the

outlet for his own work.

I think amateur journalism saved Lovecraft, both as a writer and as a

being. There was Lovecraft in 1913, 1914, basically rotting away. He clearly

didn't know what to do with himself.

And then all of a sudden, here was this... small world of amateur

where there are other people like him trying to be writers but not writing for

money. And I think at that moment that was important to Lovecraft because

amateur journalism was a kind of school for writers.

Lovecraft went on to publish his own amateur magazine, The Conservative.

In its pages he exhibited a strong passion for the beliefs he formed during

isolation, including a pronounced xenophobia.

The most alarming tendency observable in this age is a growing disregard for the

established forces of law and order.

Whether or not stimulated by the noxious example of the almost subhuman Russian

rabble, the less intelligent element throughout the world seems animated by a

singular viciousness.

Every artist with every work of art is a product of his or her time. And he

reflected a lot of very American feelings.

The failings he had intellectually with beliefs in racism and so on are

reprehensible. They were then as they are now, and yet in a sense you can't

expect the guy to leap out of his skin and have modern sensibilities.

He had this really archaic, unbudging idea that

for society to be stable, then it had to be homogenous.

He just didn't like to see the culture he knew go down the drain, which he felt

would happen just by erosion as more and more immigrants came. It's almost a Pat

Buchanan kind of a thing.

This absolutely genuine worry of the evils of breeding, of mixed breeding,

and breeding in general, I suppose, but the evils of taking purity.

with an almost Aryan sense of pride.

Regardless, the conservative attracted fellow amateurs both sympathetic and

contrary. They were attracted by Lovecraft's erudite mind.

And as a result, Lovecraft developed very close ties to a number of these

amateur journalists.

And these became lifelong friends of his, and they exchanged many, many

even after they had left the amateur journalism movement.

And he kind of found his home.

in a magazine like that, and other main fan magazines that he wrote for.

And he found a lot of like -minded souls out there would read his stuff and

really love them.

And he developed followers.

I mean, it's almost like a cult in and of himself.

He wrote so many letters at such white heat and such intensity and at such

length that it's easy to suppose that he sacrificed stories to his

correspondents. I believe he had something like over 120 ,000 letters

And these letters aren't short pieces, too. I mean, they're copious.

Pages and pages of details and notes or suggestions on how to improve their own

writing. As his web of correspondence grew, it also allowed Lovecraft to test

early stories on respected readers.

In 1919, an amateur journal called The Vagrant took notice.

Dagon. was the first of Lovecraft's stories to be printed.

A captured sailor escapes German sea raiders, only to come aground on a

of sea bottom forced up by a volcanic upheaval.

The region was putrid with the carcasses of decaying fish and of other less

describable things, which I saw protruding from the nasty mud of the

plain.

It's got this awful sense of atmosphere. The poor guy is out in the middle of

nowhere, surely doomed with the black sun scowling on him. What an image.

As the sailor explores the reef, he discovers a cyclopean monolith whose

surface depicts a race of ancient fishmen.

They were damnably human in general outline, despite webbed hands and feet,

shockingly wide and flabby lips, glassy, bulging eyes, and other features less

pleasant to recall.

Suddenly all hell breaks loose with this huge Charlie Tuna character coming out

and embracing this monolith. And then at the end, what happens is the narrator

just demented. He's now on the other side of the world, but afraid that old

Charlie's following him. And he's, oh my God, the thing in the window. Well, has

this creature followed him or is he just plain nuts? We don't know, but either

way, it's a great little story.

But, you know, you have it there. You've got the creature from the Cytopean

creature from the sea. It's virtually Cthulhu in miniature.

Dagon and other stories from this period would set the Lovecraftian model.

Scholarly people discovering violations of natural law and being driven towards

madness or death.

It also exhibited Lovecraft's use of Baroque descriptions and subjective

adjectives. One of the cliché notions of Lovecraft, propounded by people who

don't very much like his work usually, you know, is that he only had one style

that consisted mostly of piling on the adjectives. Like, um, over the

eldritch town of Dulwich, the gibbous moon hung illuminating the

squamous and batracian inhabitants.

So what he's saying there is just that, um...

You know, the moon was nearly full over the weird town of Dulwich and everybody

who lived there was bloody peculiar frog.

But Lovecraft is a Baroque writer in the sense that he goes in and

carefully modulates this overripe, incredibly

convoluted phraseologies and sentences and style, but it's all his own.

If you meet Lovecraft for the first time as an adult, you do kind of have to

learn how to read him.

It's not a modern style. It's not a stripped -down style.

It's not a very efficient style. And there are many, many things about it

are risible.

He will pick a few words and overuse them appallingly. Eldritch.

Gibber. But a lot of his stories are all mood.

Nothing happens.

Especially nothing happens to the narrator.

They're just people who...

Start terrified and they end up terrified.

And there are other things you can make fun of him for. The tendency to write in

the first person and to keep writing.

The ultimate parodic Lovecraftian phrase is somebody going mad while writing

and something's coming up. I can hear them now coming up the steps.

They're hellish.

Tentacles are squirming at the door.

Ayah, Shab -Niggurath, the Beast of the Thousand Young.

Fatang, Fatang.

And you're done. Dot, dot, dot.

You disappear in a burst of ellipses, metallic.

It's a style that is incredibly anal retentive.

And you know this guy went over it and over it and over it until he made the

combination that to his taste, which may be gaudy to some, it was in perfect

balance. One thing that influenced this purple style was Lovecraft's current

fascination with the writing of Lord Dunsany.

Dunsany wrote these magical little tales of dreamlands and gods, and he has this

amazing prose style influenced by the King James Bible and apparently nothing

else. Lovecraft was very taken by Dunsany's...

creation of a mythical pantheon of gods.

And Lovecraft eventually admitted that that's how he came to write the stories

of the Cthulhu mythos. He took those Dunsanian gods, which are set in a

world, and put them into the real world. And that's how he came up with his own

cosmic mythology.

The Lovecraft was now a published author.

Pursuing payment for what was only to be a personal pleasure was far from his

idea of a gentleman.

an existence that enjoyed being rather than doing.

His fellow amateurs urged Lovecraft to go against his anti -commercialism and

hire out his skills as a ghostwriter.

As an invisible author, Lovecraft would be published many times between 1918 and

1920.

With no practical experience in commerce, however, Lovecraft charged

lower than the standard of the time.

barely clearing a minimum goal of $15 a week.

Despite meager returns, this was a prolific time for Lovecraft.

By 1921, he had written close to 17 stories.

Unhappy is he to whom the memories of childhood bring only fear and sadness.

Wretched is he who looks back upon lone hours in vast and dismal chambers with

brown hangings and maddening rows of antique books.

The glory of the outsider is that it is the story of the thing beyond our ken,

briefly coming into the firelight, into that circle, and then fleeing back into

the darkness.

A lone narrator emerges from his crumbling castle after a long seclusion.

He comes onto the surface of the earth to find people fleeing in terror from a

monstrous thing the narrator can plainly see before him.

I love the twist ending, so to speak.

And that you're reading the story and the very last line in the story scares

you. I was proud of this guy as he escaped from these catacombs.

And the moment that the real people saw him and screamed and he saw his

reflection. And in horror stretches out his hand and touches a mirror.

Boom, that's the end of the story.

Oh my gosh, he is a ghoul. He's a creature from the darkness. Now we must

with him.

And I went back and reread it just to see how he'd done that.

At its best, Lovecraft is as much an existentialist as Albert

Camus would be. I know always that I am an outsider, a stranger in this

century, and among those who are still men.

This is...

as a strong statement about how I felt in my teenage years as anything.

He's writing what may very possibly be disguised autobiography. It does seem to

be about somebody who had an unhappy childhood and who felt he was physically

repulsive. But did he feel that because of that he was an object of horror, that

everybody shunned him?

Certainly in terms of his physical appearance, he was sort of embarrassed

a number of things. He felt he had these ingrown facial hairs and that he felt

that was a disfiguring factor.

So in a way, he's kind of using himself as a jumping off point. But I think he

would come off much more as the weirdo that Colin Wilson makes him if he really

were like these characters in the stories. And ultimately, I don't think

When Lovecraft emerged from his own isolation, the consensus of Providence

that the house on Angel Street was one to be avoided, and that Lovecraft and

mother were eccentrics.

Though this view could be argued in the case of Lovecraft, Susie was indeed

cause for concern.

Her home life was one of hypertension, where Susie was known to cause major

dramas over the slightest thing.

On March 13, 1919,

around the same time her son was emerging as a writer.

Susie Lovecraft had been admitted to the same institution that claimed her

husband years before.

Susie Lovecraft passed away on May 24th, 1921, not from nerves, but from a

botched gallbladder operation.

Susie's death was hard on Lovecraft, both emotionally and financially.

She left her son a meager estate, which was already meager when she inherited it

from her father.

That inheritance, plus an equally paltry income from ghostwriting, barely met

Lovecraft's expenses.

He made little enough money himself and used to survive by eating hideous cans

of beans.

But I have to wonder about Lovecraft and whether or not he would have taken any

old job just to be able to make money, and I don't think he would. He had a

certain set of standards, and again, he had a level of pride that he was

a gentleman, he was an author.

and he's not going to just take any old job.

Lovecraft moved in with his aunts, Lillian Clark and Annie Gamwell.

But aunts were no substitute for a mother.

His fiction writing waned.

Relief came from one of Lovecraft's fellow journalists.

Herbert West's Reanimator actually is a very funny story, and Lovecraft intended

it, I think, to be funny.

It was commissioned for a humor magazine, for which Lovecraft received

per installment.

Keep in mind, it was a humor magazine called Home Brew, founded and edited by

one of his amateur friends, George Julian Houtain.

Houtain said, you can't make them too horrible.

So clearly Lovecraft was encouraged to write just the most outlandish,

flamboyant horror that he could think of.

Lovecraft chafed under the restrictions of episodic writing.

Still, the series debuted in January of 1922 under the banner Gruesome Tales.

later to be titled Herbert West, Reanimator.

Of Herbert West, who was my friend in college and in afterlife, I can speak

with extreme terror, holding with Haeckel that all life is a chemical and

physical process, and that the so -called soul is a myth.

My friend believed that artificial reanimation of the dead can depend only

the condition of the tissues.

I love the sense of atmosphere on the Herbert West stories, the sense of

that evidently were not in the movies, but the sense of history, it gives you a

sense of place and context that is extremely strong.

Now, a lot of people feel that the influence of Frankenstein is heavy on

story. I disagree, because remember what Victor Frankenstein was doing was

creating an artificial man from...

different parts of human bodies. What Herbert West is trying to do is

an entire living body after it has theoretically died.

A very different conception, I think.

West's adventures in reviving corpses was not among Lovecraft's favorite work,

nor his most profitable.

Nevertheless, it was a small milestone in his career as a professional writer.

During this time, Lovecraft also developed two fascinations incongruent

xenophobic personality.

travel, and a woman.

Lovecraft had been lured away from Providence for a gathering of amateur

journalists in Boston.

The prospect of intellectual discourse with his compatriots was too rich to

refuse.

Rare trips soon became a habit, even if Lovecraft preferred to stay within the

Northeast, where familiar traditions prevailed.

On one such visit in 1921, H .P. Lovecraft met Sonia Haft Green of New

Born on March 16, 1883, Sonia was far more experienced in the ways of the

having been married once before.

He met this woman who was Jewish.

One of the things that I found reading the letters, Lovecraft's letters, was

anti -Semitic he was.

And the idea that he ended up marrying a Jewish woman, I think, is pretty

extraordinary. And she must have looked at him and decided that she wanted him.

He wasn't the worst sketch in the world. I suppose he had a certain dignity.

He was kind of tall and thin and bony.

She was just the opposite of him. She was very outgoing and very social, and

sounded like she was fun.

And she was the one who, as I understand it, introduced him to sex.

It was a shared passion for the literary, however, that attracted them

During one of many moonlit walks together, Lovecraft and Sonia

weird grunting noise in the night.

It was an obvious inspiration for one of his stories, but Lovecraft encouraged

Sonia to write it instead.

This encouragement earned Lovecraft a kiss, his first since childhood, and

a rare sign of physical affection from his mother.

Sonia's story became The Horror at Martin's Beach and was published in

By that time, she had convinced Lovecraft to test the waters of New York

with a prolonged visit.

She knew that Lovecraft had to be taken out of Providence, that if he was going

to really have a life, that he had to go out into the world. And she knew how

talented he was, and she felt that if he went to New York, that the magazines

were actually published and could meet some people, and he could become a

success.

But in a growing metropolis teeming with immigrants, an acute xenophobic like

Lovecraft would soon experience problems.

For the moment, though, Lovecraft had every reason to be hopeful.

Sonia had entered his life.

And in March 1923, Weird Tales magazine was born.

As much as science fiction and fantasy might be marginalized today, it was

certainly a lot more marginalized in the 1920s and 30s. Weird Tales was very

influential as it happened.

It was the best of all the pulp magazines.

devoted to weird fiction, to horror stories and a certain kind of sci -fi.

Tales of the Fantastic had been increasing in popularity.

Publisher J .C. Haneberger saw potential in dedicating an entire journal to the

genre. There was a market there, as low -paying as the market might have been,

as marginalized as the magazine might have been.

Even though it's being printed on toilet paper, it doesn't matter. There is a

market there, and there are readers, and there was a place for it to start.

It was virtually a roll call of the great pulp fantasy writers, and

much better than pulp implied.

Many masters of imaginative fiction got their start in the pages of Weird Tales.

H .P. Lovecraft was no different.

Well, Lovecraft regarded Weird Tales as his single market, basically, the one

magazine that he was, well, relatively proud to write for, even though it has

be said that he appreciated that the average Weird Tales story, perhaps below

average Weird Tales story, was not that great.

It took a great deal of convincing from Sonia and other friends, but Lovecraft

finally relented and sent in a selection of stories.

Weird Tales bought all five submissions.

Thus began a lifelong relationship.

On March 3, 1924, Lovecraft embarked on another relationship.

After an aggressive campaign from Sonia, Lovecraft finally asked for her hand in

marriage. The bride was nearly 41.

The groom was 33.

His aunts were outraged by this. They thought that the girl that he married

completely beneath him.

At huge risk to his sense of security, Lovecraft would leave Providence to live

with his new wife in New York.

For a virgin recluse of Puritan moral standards, marriage promised to be an

interesting experience.

Sometimes I feel like she just must have been something just sort of a saint.

Because what she married was a guy who refused to work, except on his stories.

This is the one area in which I think Lovecraft really failed as a human

And I think she acknowledged in her own memoir at some point that she felt like

she could change him.

She couldn't change him.

Between 1922 and 1924, Lovecraft's narrative output was on another upswing.

This included the creation of three recurring elements of Lovecraft's

mythology.

Miskatonic University.

The Dark Town of Arkham.

and literature's most dreaded grimoire, written by an alter ego from Lovecraft's

childhood, one inspired by his reading of the Arabian Nights, The Mad Abdul

Alhazaret. The Necronomicon has become this strange sort of combination of

urban legend and bad jokes.

First of all, it existed in the mind of Lovecraft.

And then other people used it. It was one of the easiest things. The

Necronomicon of the Mad Arab Alhazred. Yes, this is the book of

all of the forbidden things.

The Necronomicon was a book that collected all manner of summoning

Spells that would cause the return of ancient creatures from unknown worlds

dimensions.

Well, the Necronomicon is yet another of those Lovecraftian concepts that was,

you know, never meant to be fully bodied for.

It's a series of references that again imply this much larger tome with more

terrible secrets than Lovecraft can even hint at. So then other people would use

it. You've got Fritz Leiber and you've got Bloch and you've got Manly Wade

Wellman and August Derleth, all these other writers putting it into their

So now it feels a little truer, like maybe it ought to exist.

Another story from this period can be seen as one of Lovecraft's early best,

Rats in the Walls.

Rats in the Walls was one of two stories that I read when I was a kid. My father

bought me a book called Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural, and it had

all sorts of stories in it.

Two from Lovecraft, Rats in the Walls and The Dunwich Horror.

And he read them aloud to me when I was a kid.

It was mind -blowing.

A gentleman of the Delapore family returns to his ancestral estate in

There, he and his black cat, Niggerman, are disturbed by verminous slithering

behind the walls.

Lovecraft was great at depicting the moment of discovery by sound or by a

fleeting shadow.

And it really put you there and made you almost...

empathically experience the moment where you heard the noise behind the

woodwork. More than a lot of the stories, it literally embodies that

deep time in the sense of as de la Porte is trying to investigate the source of

the phenomenon in the house, begins to go through the sub -basement, the sub

-sub -basement, down into these vast subterranean caverns beneath the house.

That exploration into the depth of the castle is simultaneously an exploration

into the depth of the past and the horrors that come out of history.

I seemed to be looking down from an immense height upon a twilight grotto,

-deep with filth, where a white -bearded demon, Swineherd, drove about with his

staff a flock of fungus, flabby beasts, whose appearance filled me with

unutterable loathing.

Then, as the Swineherd paused and nodded over his task, A mighty swarm of rats

rained down on the stinking abyss and fell to devouring beasts and man alike.

It's one of the stories where Lovecraft is playing with the classical Gothic

trope. You know, you have the family with the hidden things. You have all of

these sort of early 18th century Gothic elements to the story.

All of this strange stuff about the Hexum Priory and this lost world

under the cliff there and these squealing white flabby beasts and the

characters in the stories being descended from different lines, the bad

that bred these things and the things having evolved. What a brilliant,

brilliant work.

It's really creepy stuff. It gets under your skin.

And I think it's kind of obvious. You tear down the walls of any kind

of civilized person, behind there is something that's really abominable

Rats were snatched up by weird tales in 1924.

The first year and a half of Lovecraft's marriage was like a tonic.

It was grand. It was a new adventure for him.

He also made lots of friends there, too. Frank Long, for example, being one of

his best friends.

Work, however, and Lovecraft's drive to find it was limited.

I think, A, he didn't want a job, and B, he knew

that any employment he could find in the city of New York or elsewhere would be

really bruising for him.

The longer Lovecraft stayed in New York, the worse his xenophobia became.

almost as a retaliation against the immigrant outsiders flourishing around

The unraveling of the rug, so to speak, happened, you know, because of financial

reasons.

Sonia lost her hat shop and eventually had to look for work in Cleveland.

A job offer was greeted with enthusiasm by Sonia and loathing from Lovecraft.

That was too far from Providence. Brooklyn was unbearable, but at least it

just a train ride away.

By the end of 1924, Sonia had no choice but to leave for the Midwest, alone.

Sonia would be back and forth to support her husband, but her influence over

Lovecraft's mood was waning.

His ridicule of the melting pot that was New York City reached manic, even

racist levels.

I certainly hope to see promiscuous immigration permanently curtailed soon.

Heaven knows, enough harm has already been done by the admission of limitless

hordes of the ignorant, superstitious, and biologically inferior scum of

Southern Europe and Western Asia.

For the most part, Lovecraft kept these views to himself, knowing full well that

his friends and correspondents did not share his views.

It wasn't long before his fiction gave voice to these demons.

Red Hook is a maze of hybrid squalor near the ancient waterfront opposite

Governor's Island.

From this tangle of material and spiritual putrescence, the blasphemies

hundred dialects have sailed the sky.

Policemen despair of order or reform and seek rather to erect barriers

protecting the outside world from the contagion.

I don't think you can ever correlate what people think or believe with what

write. or at least I don't think you can do it on the one -to -one basis so

beloved of literary scholars, academics, and amateur psychologists.

For modern standards, there is plenty of racism in Mark Twain. There's plenty of

racism in Edgar Rice Burroughs. There's plenty of sexism in Edgar Rice

Burroughs. You could fault those works for belonging to that time, but I

that it's actually a...

a fossil record of what a gentleman of New England would think at the time.

very, very easy to look at Lovecraft and go, OK, well, you know, Cthulhu means

the female genitalia, or all of these outsiders are really Jews, or

black, or, you know, this is what the Batrachian thing is all about. It's a

cunningly disguised racism.

He did, however, make overtly racist statements towards some groups.

And that's certainly no surprise back in the 20s and 30s. And it's too bad.

I mean, that doesn't make it right. But I just don't think you can take it

seriously. It would be funny if it were not so objectionable. And to a certain

extent, it still is funny, even though it is completely objectionable. The

sheltered.

who took a long, long time to grow. I was going to say never grow, but that

isn't true. And so he's reacting in an adolescent fashion to these streams of

people who flooded the streets in Brooklyn, in Red Hook, Brooklyn.

And I think when he referred to himself as an unassimilated alien, I think he

understood that when he was in New York, on some level he understood, despite

all of his protestations, that New York worked.

Despite his perception of it as this horrid, chaotic cesspool, it was

that worked. He didn't work.

It became clear to friends that Lovecraft's exile in New York was

breakdown.

Some even feared a suicide attempt.

Help came from Lovecraft's aunts, Lillian and Annie, who found a small

their nephew back in the safety of Providence.

Sonia offered to buy the house for him, but this was not New York.

In Providence, propriety would reign.

If Lovecraft could not support his wife, he would distance himself instead.

In April of 1926, Lovecraft returned to his beloved city.

He was released from Brooklyn, and he went back to his immense, to his almost

unimaginably immense relief, the Providence.

That summer of 1926 was the start of Lovecraft's richest period.

It started with an idea he had outlined during those fearful days in New York.

an idea which became the most notable addition to Lovecraft's fictional

universe. The story of Lovecraft, the first one I read was The Call of

like most everyone I imagined.

And it just struck me because it was a combination of cosmology, anthropology,

and horror that was all melded into one.

George Gamal Angel, Professor Emeritus of Semitic Languages at Brown

is mysteriously murdered on the streets of Providence.

Sometime earlier, Angel had come into possession of a troubling clay

The

description

of the monster is...

probably better seen on paper than it would be visualized.

That's the thing about Lovecraft. All his creatures are really interesting

you read them because your imagination starts to work on it, and you keep it

amorphous and disgusting.

With the seafood variety that H .P. Lovecraft describes, I mean, he must

had something about fish that really bothered him, you know?

Squid and octopus and stuff like that.

Angel's investigations of the graven image are taken up by his grandnephew.

I mean, here's this guy whose eccentric uncle died, and he's looking through all

these papers, as I did when Lynn Carter died. I mean, it's kind of a chore, but

you never know what kind of goodies you're going to find, and he sees all

crazy things. What the heck was he into?

When you read it, it's sort of an incredibly clumsy story. It's, here's a

of this, and here's the newspaper report, and here's a...

It's sort of part journalism and it's almost anecdotal. It doesn't really have

plot. It's assembled in fragments in a very interesting way, almost a modernist

way. And what that technique does is to suggest an aura of mystery in itself.

And before long, he's into it, and before long, he's expecting the secret

of Cthulhu to come get him. And why is he even writing this thing, since he

doesn't want anybody else to know about it? It's about that recurring thing in

Lovecraft, that fear of science, or just human knowledge, going where it doesn't

need necessarily to go, of accidentally uncovering things that either, well,

there's not much point in us knowing them, or knowing them could lead to our

destruction.

The nephew endeavors to connect reports of vivid dreams across the world, dark

practices in the bayous of New Orleans, and the discovery of a corpse city by a

band of innocent sailors.

There lay great Cthulhu and his hordes, hidden in green slimy vaults, and

sending out at last, after cycles incalculable, the thoughts that spread

the dreams of the sensitive.

Cthulhu is almost like the Paul Revere of all these deities, you know, or the

King Arthur waiting to come back, you know, and take over.

He's just a general evil that exists in another place, but it's like

Christianity in a sense.

In a sense, our creator, he's our destroyer.

He's kind of another version of the devil, I suppose, except slimier.

As elaborate as this story was, the spelling and pronunciation of the

names was even more so.

Cthulhu. Cthulhu.

Cthulhu. Cthulhu. Cthulhu. Of course, the discrepancy on the enunciation of

name, this is my fourth language.

Poppy Z. Bright makes fun of the way I pronounce Cthulhu, but I don't know

another way. I look at the way Lovecraft tried to pronounce it, and I can't

pronounce it.

Many of his colleagues apparently didn't know how to pronounce it or pronounce

it wrongly.

And so finally, in a letter of 1934, he tells a colleague, well, it's really

meant to be two syllables.

You're supposed to put your tongue at the roof of your mouth and cough it out

like cloo -loo.

But he says, you know, the name is an entirely alien name not designed to be

pronounced by human vocal cords.

The word is only a symbol for something that is entirely beyond the ability for

humans to make the sound.

So there is no incorrect way to pronounce it because there's no correct

pronounce it.

Despite Lovecraft's efforts to weave a rich narrative, The Call of Cthulhu was

initially rejected by Weird Tales.

This was common practice of the anthology's editor, Farnsworth Wright,

especially when presented with a story as original as Lovecraft's creation.

One of Lovecraft's tricks, of course, was to take the rejected story, sit on

for a little while, send it back to Wright saying, well, I've made the

you asked for, having not done a single thing with it. And more often than not,

apparently, Wright would fall for this trick.

The Call of Cthulhu was eventually printed in February 1928's issue of

Tales.

Lovecraft's fee for such a seminal work of fiction?

$165.

As Lovecraft's writing began to blossom, so did the man.

I vastly regret the absence of traditional accomplishments, fencing,

horsemanship, military service, caused by my early ill health and lack of

appreciation of the quality of well -roundedness.

Lovecraft began to entertain his friends once more, including them on long walks

through Providence and other New England excursions.

Lovecraft was even beginning to evolve a form of tolerance toward the outsiders

around him, especially the many cultures now living in Providence.

In February of 1927, it was time for his writing to expand as well.

Charles Exeter Ward is the novel in which he applies all his sense of

to that.

long work, and the effect is tremendous.

The beginning of Ward's madness is a matter of dispute among alienists.

Dr. Lyman, the eminent Boston authority, places it in 1919 or 1920.

This is certainly born by Ward's altered habits, especially by his continuing

search for a certain grave dug in 1771, the grave of an ancestor named Joseph

Kerwin. Joseph Kerwin was an obscure individual who fled from Salem to

Providence around 1761.

Now the first odd thing about Joseph Kerwin was that he did not seem to grow

much older than he had been on his arrival. At length, when over 50 years

passed since the stranger's advent, and without producing more than five years

apparent change in his face and physique, the people began to whisper

darkly. Alchemy and the Black Arts proved to be Kerwin's secret.

I think one of the flaws of that story, and it may be only a flaw to me, is that

it uses a kind of pseudoscience that is actually a little bit beneath

Lovecraft's acumen. It explains mysterious and

horrifying events by reference to certain essential salts.

And by the like method from the essential salts of humane dust.

A philosopher may, without criminal necromancy, call up the shape of any

ancestor. And that's a little third rate. It's like bad science fiction.

A band of raiders confront the doomed man and his unhallowed wizardry.

That night was never remarked on again until Charles Ward learned of his

from Kerwin in 1918 and continued his ancestor's experiments, connecting the

past with the present.

summoning the unspeakable to life.

It's almost like a detective story. Dr.

Willett is really discovering what happened to Charles Dexter Ward,

about Kerwin and the unfortunate accidents from the efforts to basically

demons down from the stars.

When they didn't have all the pieces, when they didn't have all the remains,

terrible awfulness would be brung up and they'd have to be put somewhere. Of

course, I wasn't quite sure why they just didn't destroy them, but maybe it

for sport. Who knows? It's one of those cases where his detractors say, well,

he's writing about unspeakable horrors and simply telling us that they're

unspeakable. In fact, if that's all you get out of the moment where Dr. Willits

looks down the well and sees something that Lovecraft actually certainly finds

metaphor for it.

Tremendously more than just the unspeakable, the cosmic in bodily form.

Though completed, the lengthy tale of Charles Dexter Ward was never typed or

submitted. He just left it in a drawer he didn't think it was worth bothering

with. It was a first draft, amazingly. I believe Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath

was also.

How he didn't see the merit in this stuff is just amazing.

I don't think he was built to write longer narratives.

He went as far as he could that way, and he did press the envelope.

Some of those last stories are really rather long.

but they're also inert in a certain way that a novel cannot afford to be.

There was another tale written during this time on which Lovecraft held an

entirely different opinion.

The Color Out of Space is just a great science fiction movie, story.

It should be a movie, although I don't know how you do the color because it's

unlike anything we've seen, and I don't know what that is.

There is a type of story where you go to the minimal setting.

a household in a farm or in a far field, and you unleash upon them

a cosmic melody, you know, a cosmic curse.

It all began in 1882 with a meteorite.

And by night, all Arkham had heard of the great rock that fell out of the sky

and bedded itself in the ground beside the well at the Naom Gardner place.

They had uncovered what seemed to be the side of a large colored globule

embedded in the substance.

The color, which resembled some of the bands in the meteor's strange spectrum,

was almost impossible to describe. And it was only by analogy that they called

it color at all.

And the color out of space, it is, as the story has it, just a color out of

space. It's literally indescribable in prose terms.

It's something that's almost impossible to even detect.

It's something that's so incredibly insidious that there's no escaping from

except by geographically removing yourself as far as you can from the

By the next harvest, Laura and Fauna are found deformed, and the Gardner family

is infected with an unexplained madness.

It happened in June, about the anniversary of the meteor's fall, and

woman screamed about things in the air which she could not describe.

In her raving, there was not a single specific noun.

She was being drained of something.

Something was fastening itself on her that ought not be.

It wasn't just the meteorite, it was something inside the meteorite that

to spread and poison the landscape and mutate the landscape and the people.

It's one of those stories of Lovecraft that moves into physical gruesomeness,

the effects on the unlucky family in the farmhouse, but then it passes beyond

that into absolute...

awesomeness, the kind of real transcendental quality of terror that

Lovecraft achieved.

Though the call of Cthulhu looked to the stars, the color out of space was

clearly set in the realm of science fiction.

For this very reason, Lovecraft submitted his tale to the new journal

Stories. Though they would eagerly publish the story in September of 1927,

lack of payment convinced Lovecraft that he should never stray far from the

known quantity of Weird Tales.

They would be the only magazine he formally submitted to for the rest of

life.

During a 1928 excursion to Massachusetts, Lovecraft happened on a

stones.

Oldest of all are the great rings of rough -hewn stone columns on the

more generally attributed to the Indians than to the settlers.

Along with talk of witch blood, the eerie cries of the Whippoorwills, and

ever -present Old Ones, Lovecraft shaped the Dunwich Horror.

It was in the township of Dunwich that Wilbur Whateley was born on the 2nd of

February, 1913.

Lavinia Waitley had no known husband, but according to the custom of the

made no attempt to disavow the child.

There is an inbreeding between gods and man, and they produce, you know, what do

you produce? You've got this half -god, half -man thing.

Wilbur Whateley's grandfather is Old Wizard Whateley. He's an eccentric New

England hick. What's his motivation? Is he trying to end the world because he's

some kind of Sodian nihilist? No, he just needs a few extra bucks.

Yogg -Sothoth agrees to give him pirate doubloons if he pimps out his daughter

to him. At the age of 10, Wilbur Whateley attained an unnatural thigh,

fully grown man.

His facial aspect, too, was remarkable for its maturity.

Exceedingly ugly despite his appearance of brilliancy. There being something

almost goatish or animalistic about his thick lips, large, pawed, yellowish

skin, coarse, crinkly hair, and oddly elongated ears.

What troubled the residents of Dunwich even more were the number of cattle

purchased by Old Whateley without ever increasing the size of his dock.

and the dreaded something being kept in the upper part of the Waitley farmhouse.

There are twins that were born to Lavinia, and one is a normal, mostly

-looking, eight -foot -tall, goatish -looking man, and a half -seen,

invisible half -brother, which is much more like his father.

Soon, a mysterious thunder was heard in the woods.

Livestock and eventually entire families disappeared.

and Wilbur Waitley was discovered breaking into Miskatonic Library in

a complete Necronomicon, one that contained the rights for the Old Ones'

Yog -Sothoth knows the gate.

Yog -Sothoth is the gate.

Yog -Sothoth is the key and guardian of the gate.

Past, present, future, all are one in Yog -Sothoth.

The Dunwich Horror earned Lovecraft his biggest payday from Weird Tales, $240.

But again, Lovecraft failed to capitalize on his success and would not

more than a year.

This time, Lovecraft's reticence was due to a desire for artistic growth.

There are my Poe pieces and my Dunsany pieces, but alas, where are my Lovecraft

pieces?

Lovecraft's writing on the surface appears to be imitations of other

If you see the early stories, there is...

a much more constrained sense of scope.

And towards the end of his life, he was gaining as a writer, I think, and

gaining as an artist and as a human being, and his view of the world became

ample. And I think when Lovecraft shed the influence of D 'Antoni and

started writing like Lovecraft, that's when things take off.

He was writing much better fiction. He was writing much more contemporary

fiction.

in many senses. I mean, in the sense that the language was more contemporary

the settings were more contemporary.

You can even see how some of his descriptions start becoming more

You know, they go from being unnameable, obscene things...

to being described as a cucumber body with so -and -so tentacles, with

or proboscis in its end. You know, he really started relishing that, and he

started giving a sense of dignity and history to these creatures that I think

unique.

With Providence as a lifeline, Lovecraft was emboldened to venture further and

further in art and in life.

His correspondence engaged in healthy discussions on race, men, and

civilization. The more Lovecraft exposed himself to other opinions and places,

the more his views and phobias began to soften.

This self -improvement did not extend to his marriage, however.

Since his return to Providence, Sonia had seen very little of her husband.

While she remained in New York for the sake of a career, Lovecraft favored his

cherished city.

On March 25th, 1929, after constant pleas from Sonia, the Lovecrafts filed

divorce. Sonia went on to Europe, a place Lovecraft had always longed to

but never did.

Later she moved to California where she remarried and led a full life until

1972.

In 1930, Lovecraft had begun work on a new tale.

By the time it was published in August of 1931, The changes in Lovecraft could

be glimpsed on the page.

Well, we need to celebrate the Whispering Darkness because, of course,

astronomers have now taken the planetary status away from Pluto, which is to

say, you know, Black Yuggoth on the rim.

And, in fact, the Whispering Darkness was Lovecraft's reaction to the

of a new planet.

After a rash of unprecedented floods in Vermont...

Misshapen cadavers wash up along the riverbanks.

They were pinkish things, about five feet long, with crustaceous bodies

vast pairs of dorsal fins or membranous wings and several sets of articulated

limbs.

Albert N. Wilmarth of Miskatonic University begins to investigate the

these alien things.

The blasphemies that appeared on the Earth came from the dark planet Yuggoth.

But this was itself merely the populous outpost of a frightful interstellar race

whose ultimate source must lie far outside even the Einsteinian space -time

continuum. It's actually one of Lovecraft's most restrained stories.

very few of those runs of adjectives. Most of it is done as a series of

something I imagine he probably learned to some extent from...

the novel Dracula, which he greatly admired.

Through the first -hand contact of his colleague, Henry Akeley, Wilmarth learns

of the dark intentions behind the buzzing creatures.

What Akeley deems a deadly danger, however, turns out to be something else

entirely. In the last stage of Lovecraft's career, when he began to

best stories, in spite of there being what I called inert earlier, you can see

him taking a different angle of vision on the monsters at the heart of what is.

known as the mythos. The Witches Were in Darkness is probably the first story in

which one begins to see this shift in attitude.

They're still frightening.

And when their voices are recorded on tape, they are intensely scary

beings. But they may not be completely inimical

to the human race.

In fact, the fungi from Yuggoth wished to expand man's senses to enable his

exploration of the cosmos and its secrets.

This process, however, involves removing the brain and placing it in a cylinder

for the journey, all in the spirit of discovery, but hardly harmless.

It's all a scam.

It's like people today that say, oh, there's no problem with Islamofascism.

Yeah, where's the problem? These people are merely misunderstood. Nah, you're

wrong, and you better hope you don't pay with your life for this stupidity. And

Wilmarth's getting sucked into this thing, and it isn't even achling

His brain's in a can somewhere, and he's being led off the path by the buzzing

lobsters and all that.

You're being set up if you think that's the case.

Still, the whisperer in darkness could be seen as a sign of tolerance to come.

During the last years of his life, Lovecraft's travels continued to expand

first -hand knowledge of the changing world around him.

He was making up for lost time.

But this long -deferred semi -introduction to the world did not take

thoroughly as it might have done had I been chronologically younger.

Lovecraft's funds could not keep up with his thirst for growth.

Ghostwriting continued, but its anonymity was becoming unattractive all

more. So in early 1931, Lovecraft began work on another original story, a tale

of ancient Antarctic horror.

It is altogether against my will that I tell my reasons for opposing this

contemplated invasion of the Antarctic, with its vast fossil hunt and its

wholesale boring and melting of the ancient ice cap, to deter the exploring

world in general from any rash and overambitious program in the region of

mountains of madness.

Some of the descriptive passages in At the Mountains of Madness seem to me to

rank with the great geographical fantasies of literature.

Actually, I think it's a painterly quality in that novel that you perhaps

find so much in his other work.

It is one of those places where all of the different influences come together,

the idea of you're trekking across the ice.

It's quite horrible.

It's Antarctica.

And it is science fiction.

You know, it's about an incursion by aliens.

In the foothills of these towering cliffs, an expedition discovers the

remains of a pre -Cambrian race.

Found monstrous barrel -shaped fossil of wholly unknown nature.

In furrows between ridges are curious growths.

Combs or wings that fold up and spread out like fans.

Arrangement reminds one of certain monsters of primal myth, especially

elder things in Necronomicon, supposed to have created all Earth life as jest

mistake. One of the most horrific ideas was that the things that the scientists

were studying started almost dissecting them.

That is a revelation of intelligence and curiosity.

The sense of curiosity these things had, leaving little trails around the

equipment and so forth, that was what was so scary to me.

Something terribly odd and horrifying chased these men out, you know, and

something that was supposed to be a fossil record is after them.

After the mysterious and utter annihilation of an advance team, the

the unfortunate expedition discover a Cyclopean city hidden among the peaks.

There, they learn the tragic history of the star -headed elder things, their

shaping of life on Earth, surviving war with other races of cosmic infinity, and

falling prey to their slave race of show gods, protoplasmic masses capable of

molding their tissues into all sorts of forms.

You know, in the 60s, there was the idea that aliens had come here and had kind

of created the human race. But that idea really was old compared to what

Lovecraft had dreamed up, which was the idea of these battling alien forces, you

know, on Earth.

And that man ended up somehow inheriting this thing almost by default because

these two major presences had sort of wiped each other out. The old ones in

Mountains of Madness are scientists.

They were artists.

They were architects.

Yes, they are tentacled cucumbers with wings, but they are sentient,

beings. And that sense of intelligence makes the evil at work in Lovecraft's

stories much more intense.

At the Mountains of Madness also displayed two new reactions to the

unknowns, fellowship and empathy.

It's a real imaginative achievement for him to have seen these threatening

beings in a warmer light eventually.

He kind of fell in love with them. He's been in love with them all along,

actually. The old ones, they may have been crinoid pickle -shaped barrels with

wings and starfishes for heads and a bad sense of humor, but they were men.

But why is that?

Because now they got the rebellious slaves, the Shoggoths, to worry about.

So has Lovecraft seen a different group as the same as him?

because all people are equal, or he sympathizes with them as slave owners

are now on the run from an even weirder race.

So I don't know what that means, really.

Not so bad. There's the elitists like I am against the uppity bad guys.

I think there is a huge Lovecraftian influence and a huge At the Mountains of

Madness influence on the first Ridley Scott alien, the idea of a ship.

that essentially lands on a planet, and they find a derelict city -sized

ship, dead denizens in it, and something that is very much

alive and waiting, and then takes over the humans, that's essentially,

you could say, very much a demand of madness.

It has influenced the story that the thing was based on.

which was a direct rip -off of The Mounds of Madness. So I think its

repercussions are very cinematic.

This was the crowning jewel of the Cthulhu mythos.

It clearly came as a crushing blow when Farnsworth Wright, editor of Weird

Tales, rejected it.

By then, sadly, Lovecraft had really decided that he no longer had

any ability to express, convey the kind of thing he wanted to convey. He was to

write very little prose fiction for the last few years of his life.

Though more stories were attempted over the next few years, most, like The

Shadow Over Innsmouth, were problematic for Lovecraft.

Lovecraft himself seemed almost embarrassed by it.

The Shadow Over Innsmouth.

And I think probably he understood, he undoubtedly understood, that it was in a

sense a kind of reversion, a hearkening back to the same sort of xenophobic

prejudices that he had embraced in his youth.

And why is everybody so down on Innsmouth?

Some of the stories would make you laugh about old Captain Mars driving bargains

with the devil and bringing imps out of hell to live in Innsmouth.

Some of them have queer, narrow heads with flat noses and bulgy, starry eyes

that never seem to shut, and their skin ain't quite right.

These things are creatures that are born looking normal, and the older they get,

the stranger they become, until eventually their transformation will be

and they'll slither off into the sea where they will live forever.

It's definitely a sort of biological horror story where you have the

of not just human society, but of the human body.

But I think the overriding concern is actually about culture. You have the

culture of the Deep Ones coming up and over the decades eating away the culture

of Innsmouth so that finally Innsmouth will vanish. There is, to be sure, a

of racist or xenophobic undercurrent to that story, but I think it's very subtle

and very...

indirectly expressed, I'm now beginning to think it must be one of Lovecraft's

one or two best stories.

And he does something that you don't see a whole lot of Lovecraft doing in

writing action scenes.

I still think that the escape from the Gilman Hotel is a marvelous action

and running across and running into the parade of horrific frogfish things, it's

wonderful and not the sort of thing that he did a lot.

Lovecraft never formally submitted The Shadow Over Innsmouth for publication.

Partially, Lovecraft marginalized himself because he was never very

complimentary of his own work.

But I think readers and critics neglected to see the imagination at work

what he wrote.

It would be a few more years before modern taste turned in his favor.

At the end of 1935, New York agent Julius Schwartz was able to sell the

previously rejected At the Mountains of Madness.

Thanks to the efforts of Donald Wondry, the shadow out of time sold soon after,

giving Lovecraft his highest combined payday, a total of $595.

By the end of 1936, just as success seemed a possibility, Lovecraft's health

began to diminish.

In many ways, I think if Lovecraft had preserved his health, He would have

become a well -known writer in the 40s and 50s if he had lived that long.

I think Lovecraft really died at the pinnacle of his talent.

Lovecraft had been suffering from a small collection of ailments, including

digestive trouble.

By the time he submitted to a doctor's diagnosis, the cancer had spread through

his small intestine.

H .P. Lovecraft died on the morning of March 15, 1937.

He was 46 and a half years old.

Although he knew himself celebrated in a small circle, he never broke through to

the public in any sense at all. And therefore, when he died, he would have

justified in thinking himself as a failure or as a very, very obscure

If it weren't for Lovecraft's disciples, he would have been forgotten.

That it was people like Darylis and...

Robert Block and so forth that kept Lovecraft alive. And they went out and

actually got his books published.

In 1939, August Derleth and Donald Wondry, two of Lovecraft's most earnest

supporters, achieved what no one had been able to do in Lovecraft's lifetime.

They founded Arkham House and released a collection of stories entitled The

Outsider and Others by H .P. Lovecraft.

Well, Arkham House came into being.

virtually out of Lovecraft's death. I mean, almost immediately on the news of

Lovecraft's death reaching August 1st.

It existed initially to publish Lovecraft and then continued with an

record as a small press.

Following on from which they decided to do more Lovecraft and then indeed to do

more of the other.

Great writers from Weird Tales, Clark Ashton Smith, for instance, and, indeed,

Wanda himself.

You know, Arkham House books became, for the most part, incredibly valuable

incredibly quickly.

They were sought after by book collectors.

Not because they were rare, but because they were good.

For, certainly, a decade or more, there was no publisher other than Arkham House

specialising in mainly supernatural horror, a very small smattering of

fiction. It was a cheap, disposable literature.

And Arkham House was one of the very first places to actually say some of

stuff needs to come out, respectively.

Since the success of Arkham House, many writers have continued to expand the

Cthulhu mythos.

In fact, this was a practice Lovecraft encouraged when he was alive.

As part of the Lovecraft game is, you know, that you get it and you want to

to it and pass it on.

And it's been part of the Lovecraft game from the very beginning.

The Fritz Leibers, the Bob Bloch, all of these people.

And August Ellis. They took a little of this, took the story, added to it,

passed it on.

And so then we started doing it.

The problem when I was a teenager was, you know, I read Lovecraft and I

this is how you do it. But unfortunately, what I meant by this to

you know, this is how you imitate it. And worse still, although I've never

more than 20 miles away from Liverpool in England, I've set these stories in

Massachusetts, you know, in Arkham and places like that, Kingsport. And it was

painfully obvious that I'd never been very far from Liverpool, particularly

the rustics opened their mouths. If you read... A story like The Mist, King's

novella, that's pure Lovecraft.

It's about these tentacle things breaking through from some other

terrorizing a grocery store in, guess where, Maine.

That's pure Lovecraft, I'm sure.

I did a story called Shoggoth, So Peculiar, in which I have two

beasties complaining about Lovecraft as a writer.

But the truth is that we only parody things that have life.

There is no point in parodying something dead. There is no point in parodying

something in which one has no interest.

There's no point in parodying or making fun of something that doesn't matter.

And almost 100 years after his death, Lovecraft don't matter.

And it is a passion that continues to this day, even in the face of criticism.

Well, there's always going to be a kind of snobbery about supernatural horror

fiction. I think, you know, the writer needs to be dead for maybe 100 years

before he's fully taken seriously.

Every creator that dwells in the genre must assume his work will not be

appreciated as if he was doing straight stuff.

It's been ghettoized.

It's really not the proper occupation of a serious writer.

Look what happened when Stephen King won that award a few years ago.

People immediately started putting him down because he wasn't writing serious

stuff.

It's very easy for us now to forget in a world in which, you know, as a fantasy,

horror, science fiction, whatever the hell I am, author, my books are going to

come out in the hardback just like anybody else's and they're going to be

their shelves just like anybody else's.

That didn't used to be the case.

But I think...

probably at the moment that we saw Luftwaffe in the Penguin modern

I think there's no question whatsoever that he's fully established and about

time too.

He has been translated into something like 25 languages around the world, from

Czech to Polish to Japanese, Korean. There's a Bengali edition.

A lot of people kind of get introduced to Lovecraft not even knowing that it's

Lovecraft. You know, you've got things like, you know, Hellboy, which is, you

know, borrowing very heavily from, you know, the Lovecraft mythos. And even

things like Pirates of the Caribbean, where you've got Davy Jones is looking

like, you know, he crawled out of Lovecraft. You know, it looks like

You look around these days and you get the plush Cthulhu phenomenon.

You get Cthulhu slippers.

You get funny Cthulhu hat.

One of the things that I think is so amazing is I met a group of people who

into playing these love -like Call of Cthulhu games and so forth, and they

all of the Lovecraft creatures, but they had never ever read Lovecraft. They

didn't know what the stories were.

His images are so outré and ghastly and macabre and colorful that they influence

all kinds of rock and roll bands.

I think he also literally appeals to the outsider and the person who is not.

well accepted in society, who's a little bit of a loner. I think one of the

reasons that Lovecraft is so popular today is that his view, which is a very

dark one, you know, that man is lucky to be ignorant, I think is what he used to

say, because if he knew the truth, he would either go crazy or he would kill

himself, is one that everyone can relate to these days.

Every election, you see the bumper stickers saying, vote for Cthulhu, why

for the lesser evil?

Such is Lovecraft's fame that some occultists insist the Cthulhu mythos is

myth. I know every religion begins as the delusion of one or two people. And

once enough people sign on, it becomes a worldview.

And if you can inhabit it and live everyday life, then it no longer seems

insane. But when you're one of the very few who believe it, there's a kind of an

intensity that results in an unbalanced character.

And that's what I'm afraid of with cultists.

actually believe there are old ones.

I think that every time somebody comes out with a world as fully fleshed as

Lovecraft creates, you are bound to find people that will start speaking Klingon

or dressing like a hobbit to go to the supermarket or believe that they can

actually channel in a couple of old ones into their living room.

And I believe that some people have actually even died trying to invoke some

the ancient gods.

I knew people that handled Star Wars this way. They were so absorbed in it.

of them wished it were true, you could tell. And another believed that it was

all true in a parallel world.

And, you know, you're beginning to go off the deep end.

So, you know, I would definitely not advise to...

put too much money or effort into invoking that Shoggoth into the kitchen,

it's up to you.

The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear. And the oldest and

strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.

We live in a world in which even if you don't know who Cthulhu is, even if

you've never read any Lovecraft, you can kind of get the joke.

And while certainly there have been far too many people, not least me, imitating

him too closely, he also has had a profound influence on people as diverse

Fritz Leiber, as Poppy Z. Bright, Caitlin Kiernan, Ted Kline, you name it.

me, the brilliance of Lovecraft, what's so important about Lovecraft is his...

It's simply his imagination.

It's incredible to think that this guy who was this reckless living in this

little house in Providence, Rhode Island, ends up spawning, you know,

essentially modern -day horror.

It's the duality of Lovecraft. It's the fact that people can take the ideas

almost as the basis of a religion. People can take the ideas from a...

theory as academic point of view or from a writing point of view and then you

can then if you just like drawing great big monsters Lovecraft is waiting for

you too