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H.P. Lovecraft: Difference between revisions
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The best known author of the [[Cosmic Horror Story]] and the origin of [[Lovecraft Country]], '''Howard Phillips Lovecraft''' (1890-1937) is considered perhaps the greatest of all horror fiction writers, rivaled only by his idol [[Edgar Allan Poe]]. An antiquarian eremite, he was more fond of books than of people, very much like most of his protagonists. There is, however, no official record of Lovecraft ever encountering anything corporeally eldritch, as much as some fans wish it were all true. To this day you can find at least a half dozen different [[Defictionalization|fabrications]] of Lovecraft's wholly fictional ''[[Tome of Eldritch Lore|Necronomicon.]]'' He credited his night terrors<ref>while similar to nightmares, they are actually the result of a sleep disorder</ref> with providing most of his inspiration; both night terrors and the filmy, oily membrane between waking and sleep factor heavily in his various works.
Although Lovecraft had a very happy childhood by his own account -- his rich grandfather, mom and aunts gave him just about everything he wanted including free run of the family library -- his early years were marked by loss. His father went insane (from syphilis) and died when Lovecraft was about eight. His grandfather died and his money was mismanaged by relatives, leaving the family penniless. Lovecraft's mother also went insane and died in a mental hospital. In his adult years he drifted in and out of poverty (mostly in), ate cold beans out of cans, lost his wife, and ended his life with cancer of the small intestine.
On the other hand, he was a member of the United Amateur Press Association and made many friends by correspondence, and when possible he would travel to meet them, journeying all up and down the east coast and even venturing into Canada. He was an amateur astronomer and antiquarian, a tireless walker and lover of all things ancient and strange. He was a professed atheist, but loved the Gods of the Ancient Egyptians and Greeks, and as a child had prayed to them.
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No summary of Lovecraft's life is complete without a mention of his passionate devotion to cats and to his home town of Providence, Rhode Island. He only owned one cat in his lifetime, but fed and named every alley cat he found. His words ''I Am Providence'' are engraved on his tombstone.
As the quote at the top shows, Lovecraft might be considered a real life [[Nietzsche Wannabe]]. He also expressed racist and xenophobic views, though he was opposed to the racial violence of [[Nazi Germany]]. Even after he married a Jewish woman, Sonia Greene, he often made anti-semitic remarks -- in response to which she gently reminded him with whom he was sleeping. Many of his early stories and poems contained overt racial slurs, mostly aimed at immigrants from Eastern Europe and the Middle East. One of the "horrors" he intended to creep out his audience was miscegenation -- racial impurity, which he considered "degenerate" -- again, a commonplace societal fear at the time, especially in the New England states where opposition to interracial marriages was higher than in the South. <ref> note that the racial slurs are far less common in his later stories, as Lovecraft moderated his views.</ref>
Lovecraft's stories featured not so much fear of people of different (non-White) skin colour, but distaste aimed at "mental, moral and physical degeneration" (a concept prevalent at the time) due to in-breeding, interbreeding with non-human creatures, or even immoral acts such as cannibalism. In his stories such degeneration could afflict the lower classes (''The Horror at Red Hook'') and inbred rural communities (''The Dunwich Horror'', ''The Shadow over Innsmouth'') as well as upper class families (''Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family'', ''The Rats in the Walls'', ''The Lurking Fear'').
On the other hand, Lovecraft's stories, especially the Dreamland stories, featured protagonists with dark skin of which he speaks quite highly, and Lovecraft was a great admirer of the civilizations of Ancient Egypt, Ancient Greece, and the Roman Empire. He differentiated between people of "noble" appearance and heritage and civilized behaviour contra "degenerate" individuals or tribes, independently of ethnicity or skin-colour. He thought that immigrants to the U.S. should keep their original language, dress and customs, not discard them and try to become "Americanized", because this made them look vulgar.
It has often been suggested that [[Alternate Character Interpretation|he only incorporated so much racism in his stories because they stemmed from the element that proliferates all of his works: fear of the unknown.]] He almost singlehandedly invented a new cosmology, but instead of being one based on science and progress, it was instead full of otherworldly horror and blind, raving deities. While most people of his time were entranced by the technological innovation produced by the Industrial Revolution, Lovecraft was [[Romanticism Versus Enlightenment|deeply suspicious of modern technology and the poorly-understood powers it vested in mankind]]. All of his work resonates with the terror of the newly-discovered magnitude of the universe, which in the early period of his life was believed to consist entirely of the Milky Way. Einstein's theory of relativity opened a door into teleportation, time travel, [[Alien Geometries|alien geometry]], and radically altered peoples' notion of space-time itself, while the discovery of pre-Cambrian fossils and Wegener's then-new-and-controversial hypothesis of continental drift brought the notion that the Earth was far older than previously believed, and that even the shape of the continents was not [[Incredibly Lame Pun|set in stone]]. All of this was subtly addressed in Lovecraft's stories of alien horror, and of the remains of ancient civilizations lost to the abyss of geological deep time.
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*** The film ''Alien V. Predator'' bears a remarkable similarity to ''At The Mountains of Madness''...
**** John Carpenter's ''[[The Thing (film)|The Thing]]'' is even closer. Indeed, a genealogical connection is plausible: the film is an adaptation of [[John W. Campbell]]'s short story "[[Who Goes There?]]", published in ''[[Astounding Stories]]'' in 1938. Campbell -- who became editor of ''Astounding'' that year -- would surely have been reading it in 1936, when it published ''At the Mountains of Madness''.
* ''[[The Call of Cthulhu]]'' -- [[Sufficiently Advanced Alien|Cthulhu]] briefly wakes, and fills the dreams of men with madness. The first and best-known Lovecraftian [[Tabletop Games|Tabletop RPG]] is [[Call of Cthulhu (tabletop game)|named after it]] and reprints the story in full.
** ''[http://www.cthulhulives.org/toc.html The H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society]'' [[Lovecraft on Film|adapted]] this story [http://www.cthulhulives.org/cocmovie/ to film] in 2005, faithful to the original, in the style of a classic 1920s black-and-white silent movie. A must-see.
* ''The Case of Charles Dexter Ward'' -- Long dead [[Necromancer]] {{spoiler|steals the identity of his [[Identical Grandson|identical great-great-great-grandson]]. After his descendent brings him back to life, the necromancer kills him}}. The source of perhaps one of the most solid pieces of advice for anyone messing with sorcery: "[[Evil Is Not a Toy|Do not call up that which you cannot put down.]]"
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** A big part of the inspiration for the "Weeds" segment (starring self-professed Lovecraft fan [[Stephen King]]) in ''[[Creepshow]]''.
** Plot also used in the movie 'The Curse', starring John Schneider, Claude Akins, and Wil Wheaton. Rather faithful to the original, under the circumstances.
** Faithfully adapted in 2008 as a black-and-white movie called ''[http://www.die-farbe.com/ Die Farbe]'' (''The Colour'') by ''Sphärentor Produktion'', a group of independent German film makers. The only colour in this black-and-white movie is the alien colour. The movie is 85 minutes long, with some cut scenes in the extras, filmed in both German and English language, and has been shown at various film festivals in Europe and USA and at German roleplaying conventions from 2010 to 2012. The setting was moved from New England, USA, to forested southern Germany, with several layers if narration and three time frames of events. The framing story is set in the 1970s, with an American narrator who is looking for his father, a former G.I. who as a young man served in Germany during WWII and now returned there and disappeared. When the son tries to reconstruct what drove the father back to this region of Germany, he stumbles over historical events that the locals wish to keep buried. The father's narrative (as told by a German ex-soldier who met the father) is set in 1945, when the Americans investigated an abandoned farmstead, which itself becomes the framing story for yet another narrative: The German ex-soldier, returned from the front to his home village to find his own family gone, tries to warn the American soldiers not to approach the abandoned farm and its well and the wasteland of its devastated farmlands, because of the "curse". He recalls the events set during the 1920s, of the meteorite from space that brought the colour to Earth. This narrative comprises the main story and is identical with the events in Lovecraft's story.
* ''The Shadow out of Time'' -- One of his best-regarded stories. Strange creature from the deep past [[Grand Theft Me|swaps bodies]] with a modern-day scholar, followed by the latter's subsequent investigations into the years he can't remember.
* ''[[The Shadow Over Innsmouth]]'' -- Man visits a [[Town with a Dark Secret]] {{spoiler|and finds [[Half-Human Hybrid|something]] [[A Worldwide Punomenon|fishy]] in [[Tomato in the Mirror|his family tree]].}}
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** Also was adapted as one of the segments in the anthology film ''Necronomicon'', with, of all people, David Warner as the star.
** Another quite faithful indie film maker adaption of ''Cool Air'' can be found in ''The H.P. Lovecraft Collection'' (Part 1) by Lurker Films, Inc.
* ''The Rats in the Walls'' -- The narrator, a man from New England, buys an old keep in England that belonged to his ancestors (and which was erected at the site of much older Roman and iron-age temples) and discovers a [[I'm a Humanitarian|horrifying]] [[Madwoman in the Attic|family]] [[People Farms|secret]] that drives him insane.
* ''The Whisperer in Darkness'' -- A science fiction First Contact story with strong [[Grand Theft Me|horror elements]]. A scholar and his pen pal friend discover a colony of sinister fungoid space-faring aliens in the mountainous rural backwaters of New England in 1930.
** ''[http://www.cthulhulives.org/toc.html The H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society]'' [[Lovecraft on Film|has]] [[Adaptation Expansion|adapted]] this puppy to [http://www.cthulhulives.org/whisperer/index.html film as well]. The DVD is out and Blu-ray versions are due to be released soon. ''Another'' must-see.
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* [[And Then John Was a Zombie]]: Happens in {{spoiler|''Shadow over Innsmouth'', and played with in ''The Whisperer in Darkness'' (Akeley does not actually become one of the creatures, but he does join their community, as it were). Pickman's alluded-to fate (later confirmed in ''The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath'') in ''Pickman's Model'' is an inversion: he does not, in fact, consider it a terrible fate at all.}}
* [[Apocalyptic Log]]: Many of his stories are either an [[Apocalyptic Log]] wrapped up in a [[Framing Device]], or just a straight [[Apocalyptic Log]].
* [[Arc Words]]:
{{quote|''That is not dead which can eternal lie,''
''And with strange aeons even death may die.'' }}
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** Well, not so much win as last out long enough for cosmic forces, by pure chance, to force Cthulu and his spawn into a deathlike slumber. Still impressive none the less.
* [[Based on a Dream]]: Not only were many of Lovecraft's stories based on dreams he had, but the characters within his works often created art or writing based on ''their'' dreams.
* [[Black and Grey Morality]]: There are three races Lovecraft describes who don't want to outright consume or obliterate humanity (by desire or nature): the Mi-Go, the Elder Things, and the Yithians. However:
** The Mi-Go think nothing of [[Brain In a Jar|extracting the brains of people and putting them in containers]] to take them travelling around the universe to enlighten them, whether they like it or not.
** The Elder Things created humanity itself as the result of a genetic experiment and view humans as little more than playthings to examine and dissect.
** And the Yithians - who seem the nicest - only care about gathering and preserving knowledge in addition to saving their own lives. They fled their own dying world by [[Body Snatcher|stealing the bodies]] of intelligent beings of Earth's distant past, [[Freaky Friday Flip|swapping minds with]] and dooming those beings to die in their place. They also think nothing of swapping minds with other beings througout history to learn about different ages while the displaced victims live for years in alien bodies, only to return to the old lives which invariably have been ruined by the Yithians' actions. The Yithians also plan to jump to new bodies of intelligent insects to escape death, dooming those insects to die in the Yithians' old bodies. Their one saving grace is their committment to fighting the race of [half-polypous creatures that invaded Earth, who would happily consume humanity and anything else alive - and even then the Yithians only fight to save their own necks.
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* [[Broke Your Arm Punching Out Cthulhu]]: Version 1 ''The Call of Cthulhu''.
* [[Cats Are Magic]]: In Lovecraft canon, specifically ''The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath'', the cats of the Dreamlands can travel to the Moon on their own power and have a secret language. They worship Bast and aid the hero in his quest. The only thing the Earth-cats fear are the cats from Saturn, who are even more powerful than they, but are in league with the [[Eldritch Abomination|Eldritch Abominations]].
** In general, you can judge your safety in the Dreamlands by the proximity of cats --
* [[Cats Are Mean]]: Subverted: Cats are helpful and only mean when humans are mean first. Lovecraft was a cat-lover, so anyone who messes with them will get their comeuppance!
** In fact, he occasionally gets into a downright [[Cute Kitten]] mode.
* [[Celibate Hero]]: All of them!
** Well, a few mention having wives, but that's about it.
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* [[Dastardly Whiplash]]: [[Large Ham|Comically exaggerated]] in ''Sweet Ermengarde''.
* [[Did Not Do the Research]]: While most of the apparent inaccuracies in Lovecraft's work are a result of [[Science Marches On]], there are a few plain old screwups. One notable example of faulty research on Lovecraft's part is ''The Picture In The House''. What's interesting is that it's not so much that he didn't do the research, but that he did it from a faulty source. The story revolves around a vintage copy of Pigafetta's ''Regnum Congo'', a chronicle of early European explorers in Africa. The story makes a point of mentioning the cannibals shown in the illustrations are oddly Caucasian-looking. The problem is that the illustrations in ''Regnum Congo'' are nothing of the sort and depict Africans who actually look African. This is because Lovecraft never actually read the book, he only knew of it from an article in the ''[[Encyclopedia Britannica]]'' which included the offending illustrations. This mistake may have actually been somewhat fortuitous in the context of the larger [[Cthulhu Mythos]], as it forms a possible connection with ''Facts Concerning The Late Arthur Jermyn And His Family'', featuring an African tribe {{spoiler|that had crossbred with albinistic [[Frazetta Man|Frazetta Men]] to produce a light-skinned race that may or may not be the originator of all the white people in the Cthulhuverse}}.
** If you know anything about Lovecraft or his views on racial purity and the inferiority of the African, you'd quickly reason he could not possibly have intentionally wanted to suggest that Caucasians are descended out of/from African tribals.
*** That alone may indicate that he did just that. He was writing ''horror'', and the idea would have certainly been horrifying in his mind. Also, there were many scientific discoveries he found distasteful, yet didn't reject out of emotional reasons. He might well have written the story to deal with his own issues in learning about the genetic connection between the Africans and the Caucasians. Not to mention that he had no trouble in writing about degenerate, barbaric white people, and did it with far greater frequency than lauding against the blacks.
*** Actually this counts for an entirely different reason, Lovecraft didnt actually care that much about miscegenation at this point in his life but he inadvertently was correct because he did not research this, the primary belief among biologists who believed evolution thought Humanity originated in Asia at the time.
** There's really nothing inherently horrifying or sanity-shattering about non-Euclidean geometry, although it ''can'' be mind-bending. This was known even in Lovecraft's time. Architect and painter [[wikipedia:Claude Fayette Bragdon|Claude Bragdon]], a contemporary of Lovecraft, saw non-Euclidean geometry as a reflection of the intrinsic mathematical harmony of the universe and an important component in design.
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* [[Mars Needs Women]]: And usually men, too.
* [[Mysterious Antarctica]] -- Visited in ''[[At the Mountains of Madness]]''.
* [[Mind Rape]]
* [[Names to Run Away From Really Fast]]
* [[No Hugging, No Kissing]]: His stories didn't feature any romantic subplot (neither, for most of the time, female characters).
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* [[Our Ghouls Are Different]]: Lovecraft popularized his own version of ghouls as a secretive living species, rather than undead or demons.
* [[Our Monsters Are Weird]]: Most of his aliens who aren't just plain [[Eldritch Abomination|Eldritch Abominations]] fall under this trope.
* [[Our Vampires Are Different]]: The {{spoiler|''enormous''}} vampire from ''The Shunned House'' manifests itself as a cloud of yellowish, man-eating fog.
** The necromancers from ''The Case of Charles Dexter Ward'' also have to practice vampirism for some months after they've been reanimated in order to become fully alive again. [[Shout-Out|One of them lives in an old castle in Transylvania]].
** And the Whateleys' herd of cows keep getting these weird incisions, and they look kind of anemic.
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* [[Reality Subtext]]: Many of the stories have hidden dimensions if you know something about the author's life, but most disturbingly in ''[[The Dunwich Horror]]''.
* [[Science Cannot Comprehend Phlebotinum]]: The mysterious meteorite in Lovecraft's ''The Colour Out of Space'' is an example of this.
** Well, they only had early 20th century science at their disposal, and the [[Phlebotinum]] they took for studying evaporated in a matter of days.
* [[Science Marches On]]: Lovecraft identified the Semitic god Dagon with his Deep Ones, based on a then-widely-accepted etymological link to the Hebrew word for "fish". Modern anthropologists consider this a coincidence, and the historical Dagon is now believed to have been a god of agriculture.
** The stories ''The Colour Out of Space'' and ''[[At the Mountains of Madness]]'' are also heavily affected by eighty years or so of progress since they focus on scientific investigations of strange phenomena. Most notably the fact that there are no [[Alien Geometry]] mountains or giant, albino penguins in Antarctica.
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** In an inversion, he wrote about a ninth planet in our solar system mere months before Pluto was discovered. In one of his correspondences, he quipped that "Maybe it is Yuggoth".
* [[Sealed Evil in a Can]]: Cthulhu, among others. Often self-sealed.
* [[Sensitive Guy and Manly Man]]: Lovecraft himself was the Sensitive Guy (for a given measure of "sensitive") to Robert E. Howard's Manly Man. They never met in person, but became friends via correspondence.
* [[Shout-Out]]: Clark Ashton Smith, [[Robert Bloch]], [http://www.dagonbytes.com/thelibrary/lovecraft/imprisonedwithpharaos.htm Harry Houdini] and some of Lovecraft's other friends became characters in his stories.
** Robert Blake in ''The Haunter of the Dark'' {{spoiler|doesn't end up well}} -- a playful [[Take That]] from Lovecraft to his young admirer Bloch.
*** To be fair, a character named Howard who is a recluse in Providence ends up dying in one of Bloch's stories. "The Haunter of the Dark" even references that story. Both stories also begin with dedications to the other author.
** A few of Lovecraft's stories refer to the works of [[Arthur Machen]], both directly (the librarian in ''[[The Dunwich Horror]]'' mentions ''[[The Great God Pan]]'' by name) and indirectly (look for "Voorish signs," among other incongruous phrases).
** "The Shadow out of time" mentions Crom-Ya, a barbarian chief who lived around 15,000 B.C. This is a homage to [[Conan the Barbarian]], Robert E. Howard's most famous character.
* [[Sliding Scale of Gender Inequality]]: Type 1, almost invariably.
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* [[Turned Against Their Masters]]: {{spoiler|The shoggoths in "At the Mountains of Madness", and the reanimated corpses (if the men that created them could be called "masters") in "Herbert West - Reanimator"}}.
** {{spoiler|Joseph Curwen}} was killed {{spoiler|[[Back From the Dead|for the first time, at least,]]}} when he lost control of his "guardians".
* [[Tropes Are Not Bad]]: Lovecraft turns [[Purple Prose]] into an art form.
* [[Uncanny Valley]]: Used extensively [[In-Universe]]. If the antagonists are human, expect the protagonist to described them as "strange".
* [[The Unpronounceable]]: Lovecraft loves names that are nigh-unpronounceable due to the fact that they were not intended for humans to speak. His most popular name is Cthulhu. Lovecraft transcribed it as either "[[Khl Ã]]»l'hloo" or "Kathooloo"; fans often use "Kuh-THOOL-hoo". Then again, even the pronunciations described by Lovecraft were said to be the closest approximation of the true name human vocal ability could produce. So, in essence, any human saying it can never pronounce it right.
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* [[Unreliable Narrator]]: a lot of the first-person narration in his stories either become more maddened as it progresses, or has the narrator repeatedly questioning [[Always Male|his]] own sanity and memories.
** Moreover, narrators who ''are'' still sane (i.e. in denial) tend to describe the creepiness that surrounds them, then blithely -- and wrongly, and often fatally -- attribute it to some mundane cause.
* [[We Are as Mayflies]]: The [[Eldritch Abomination|Eldritch Abominations]] are apparently ageless and outside of time.)
** ''The Dreams in the Witch-House'' even featured a human who had learned how to travel to spaces beyond time, and remained unageing, save for the brief visits she made back to Earth once a year.
* [[Was Once a Man]]: The title monster from "The Beast of the Cave."
* [[Weirdness Censor]]: [[Eldritch Abomination|Eldritch Abominations]] and other space aliens can usually appear to anyone they choose, but this trope is the basis for "[[From Beyond]]."
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