Terrifying vistas of reality

H P Lovecraft, the master of cosmic horror stories, was a philosopher who believed in the total insignificance of humanity

https://aeon.co/essays/the-terror-of-reality-was-the-true-horror-for-h-p-lovecraft


The Night (1908) by Léon Spilliaert. Courtesy Vincent Everarts/Collection of the Belgian State, in deposit at Musée d’Ixelles, Brussels



In July 1917, Howard Phillips Lovecraft of Providence, Rhode Island wrote a short story called ‘Dagon’. ‘If you don’t care for this,’ he wrote to one editor, ‘you won’t care for anything of mine.’ In the tale, a sailor lost at sea in a wooden rowboat finds himself abruptly stranded on a vast stretch of seabed that had risen to the surface, pushed up by volcanic activity. As the territory of marine muck hardens in the sun, the sailor begins to walk across it, heading westward towards a distant hummock. But after days of walking, he realises the knoll is in fact a high hill. Camping in its shadow, he awakes one night in a cold sweat and endeavours to climb it. But at the summit, he looks over the side ‘into an immeasurable pit or canyon, whose black recesses the moon had not yet soared high enough to illumine.’

As the moon rises higher, he sees an enormous carved monolith on the far side of the water-filled canyon, an object ‘whose massive bulk had known the workmanship and perhaps the worship of living and thinking creatures.’ As he watches, the moonlight catches ripples moving across the water:

‘Dagon’ has all the elements of a classic Lovecraft tale. Here, as in many of his later works – including The Call of Cthulhu (written in 1926), The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (1927), and At the Mountains of Madness (1931) – optimistic endeavours for knowledge, even the simple act of seeing what’s on the other side of a hill, are thwarted by incomprehensible terrors and a horrifyingly arbitrary cosmic order. These revelations shatter the minds of Lovecraft’s truth-seeking characters, including doctors, archaeologists, lost sailors, metaphysicians and scientists of all kinds.

Lovecraft honed these elements through his short stories (along with two novellas and a single novel), developing a unique version of the weird fiction pioneered by authors such as Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Machen and M R James. However, Lovecraft did not enjoy mainstream success during his lifetime. He barely survived on a measly wage brought in by his short stories (which did not sell well) and freelance editing services before he died of intestinal cancer in 1937, aged 46. Some continued to appreciate his strange stories after his death, but others found them distasteful and ineffective. In 1945, the literary critic Edmund Wilson wrote that the only real horror of Lovecraft’s fiction ‘is the horror of bad taste and bad art’. None of his contemporaries, nor perhaps even Lovecraft himself, could likely have imagined the influence he would come to exert over literature and thought as the 20th century progressed. Today, Lovecraft has become the father of cosmic horror and weird fiction – Stephen King considers him ‘the 20th century’s greatest practitioner of the horror tale’. But his influence is not limited only to literature. His more enduring influence may be as a philosopher.

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