"The Festival" (1925)

Here is one of the many H.P. Lovecraft stories that did not make it into the skimpy Library of America collection edited by Peter Straub. In fairness, in most cases it's not hard to guess the reasons for exclusion—but, on the other hand, that collection had room for hundreds more pages and LOA projects devoted to an author generally bear some suggestion of completeness. A lot of stories were left out of that one. They could have been put in their own "approach with caution" section. So, right, not much happens in "The Festival." It's mostly Lovecraft laying an eldritch mood on thick. But making it a Christmas story redeems a lot of the inert qualities for me—or "the Yuletide," as our unnamed first-person narrator prefers to call it. He is obviously aware of the holiday's ancient pagan winter solstice origins. He is visiting the town of Kingsport for the holiday. He appears to have kin there who appear to know him. Or who anyway welcome him and bring him along to the festival. It's possible he is dead. The festival is held in a kind of cave next to an underground river reached by a stairway descending from a church basement. The church sits on top of a hill. There is a nice dream quality here as events unfold, an effect often sought by Lovecraft but less often achieved. This feels like a dream because it's in that realm where it almost makes sense, with careful use of details. The utter silence, for example—of the town, of the crowd of people shuffling to the festival, of the festival itself—is positively eerie and notably "off." Lovecraft had some mystical experience the first time he visited the Massachusetts town of Marblehead, the model for Kingsport. It gets mentioned a lot in relation to this story but I file it under Lovecraft's excitable temperament. ISFDB classes it as a Cthulhu story. The Necronomicon book is in it. The narrator's relative, "the old man," is a good character—he wears a subtle mask which is hard to notice at first and makes his facial features immobile. So lots of good stuff here but no real story—various horrors and grotesqueries of the scene at the festival proper, then over and out. That's not necessarily a bad thing when I think of the contrived getaway capers that mar some of his best stories, like "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" or At the Mountains of Madness. Still, a dreamy march to a mysterious subterranean chamber and some grotesqueries don't feel like quite enough either, hence perhaps the reason it was left out of the LOA (S.T. Joshi did include it in his Penguin collection of Lovecraft). I like "The Festival" because it's a Christmas story after all, and I believe it is Lovecraft's only one. He always was a great one for respecting tradition.

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"The Terrible Old Man" (1921)

This very short H.P. Lovecraft story alas comes with the usual note of xenophobe panic, the insidious feature you are never far from with him. In this case, the specific miscreants are named Angelo Ricci, Joe Czanek, and Manuel Silva, so we know where they're coming from. Never mind how, in 1921, one Italian, one Eastern European, and one Latino—swarthy babbling immigrants all, no doubt—have come to be allied in crime. (Or, as they say on the internet, "Sounds legit!") The story is so short it might be fair to call it a short-short, which is refreshing from the normally prolix Lovecraft, who still manages to be ponderous even in the brief space here. It's actually intended as homage to Lord Dunsany, which is a nice idea, but few, of course, are as good at this kind of thing as the canny Irish aristocrat. The trio of America-destroying immigrants here are determined to rob a grizzled old sea captain who lives in a shack on the outskirts of a small New England town. He is the "Terrible Old Man" (Lovecraft's capitalization), "so old that no one can remember when he was young, and so taciturn that few know his real name." The three are convinced the old creaker's house is full of treasure from the sea and also that he is feeble. They are wrong, however, at least about his being feeble, and the charm of the story is how powerful this Terrible Old Man actually appears to be, in his wonderfully unassuming muttering way, most of it off-stage. It's Lovecraft doing Lord Dunsany, but it's still Lovecraft, so for example there's a lot of unseemly shrieking that goes down in the violation itself. Lovecraft the author wants us to think it's the old man being tortured, but we know better, and sure enough, it's the trio who come to a swift and dreadful end. "Little things make considerable excitement in little towns, which is the reason that Kingsport people talked all that spring about the three unidentifiable bodies, horribly slashed as with many cutlasses, and horribly mangled as by the tread of many cruel bootheels, which the tide washed in." No one, naturally, has noticed that three immigrants went missing, because no one in a Lovecraft story cares about immigrants except to hate them. It would be a better story without the overt bigotry, which is a main thing Lord Dunsany understood better. I appreciate Lovecraft paying respects, even in his limited way, and it's not a bad story if you can get past the sour notes. But you're better off going directly to Lord Dunsany.

The Big Book of the Masters of Horror, Weird and Supernatural Short Stories, pub. Dark Chaos
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At the Mountains of Madness (1931)

This very long H.P. Lovecraft story, arguably his masterpiece, bears interest for a number of reasons. The sweeping vision it presents counts as horror, if only because it's creepy and gets squishy, but Theodore Sturgeon reportedly called it "first-water, true-blue science fiction." It works perhaps best as an impressive example of the "lost world" story, like Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth, the King Kong movie, or Wakanda. It was written when it was possible to entertain features like an undiscovered mountain range in the Antarctic whose peaks (plural) put "Everest out of the running." It was rejected for publication for five years as too long (indignities of the overlooked genius). Last but not least, it's nearly perfect Lovecraft, grinding away at its premises until they are well fixed in the brain and provide context for adventure, confrontation, and characters losing their minds due to excessive boggling. Strains of Cthulhu, the Necronomicon, and the usual sinister documentation are heard as well. Lovecraft kept up with the science of his day (not to mention the pulp fiction), so his descriptions of this strange land in the Antarctic are informed by a sense of the Earth's history in terms of geology and a scope that breaches epochs. What he describes his small party of two encountering is hundreds of thousands and millions of years old, even as much as a billion, and he knows enough about the theories of planetary development to make it credible enough to fool a rube like me. He's all over plate tectonics, for example. The preservation of the architecture and structure of his massive dead city is another matter but apparently the dry and cold conditions in this Antarctic accommodate that. So, uh, OK, I'll buy that. Never mind the high winds. It's not perfectly preserved. In general, as so often, it's just better to agree to believe. So we get Lovecraft's usual infinitely detailed description done up in scientific drag and dipped in a sauce of art history pseudo-erudition—the Russian painter Nicholas Roerich is name-checked repeatedly in this one—and it's good as always to enter with a modicum of patience. Give him an inch and he will blow your mind a mile, but it's not always an easy inch. The plot, even such as it is, tends toward the busy and a little beside the point, also as usual, with various Antarctic expeditions and two or three alien races and/or supernatural forces, plus some giant friendly penguins. The Cyclopean horrors that drive men mad happen in a big rush at the end, almost too fast. "Too fast" is a strange thing to say about Lovecraft. I estimate At the Mountains of Madness as 85% scene-setting and description and 15% plot execution, which is all right when you remember that the 85% part is what he's best at doing. He always kept a foot planted in the Sherlock Holmes style of first-person investigation too, which brings some odd comfort of familiarity to his tales. I do admire his ability to imagine. At the Mountains of Madness is heady stuff, one of his best, and not a bad place to start on him. If you're really ambitious, read it with Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, its spiritual cousin.

H.P. Lovecraft, Tales (Library of America)

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"The Shadow Over Innsmouth" (1936)

This long story by H.P. Lovecraft has a lot of his usual gaffes as well as strengths. It's a pretty decent rave-up overall that way but, curiously, he seems to miss the most interesting point of his own story. I'm tempted to put that squarely on his ongoing xenophobic panic, not to remind everyone about it but because I think this time it hurt a story even more than usual. But not to worry. As part of the "Cthulhu Mythos," these Deep Ones and/or Old Ones have likely seen treatment by someone who doesn't miss the point (I wouldn't know because I haven't read much beyond Lovecraft in this particular universe, or even all of Lovecraft). "Innsmouth" pairs a shabby and mysterious New England seaside town with a teeming underwater civilization just over the harbor reef. The sea creatures can interbreed with humans and begin life on land. As they age they return to the waters, where they live forever (which reminded me of the robot kid in A.I.). In return for being allowed to live among the townspeople in Innsmouth, the amphibians use magical mystical powers to draw fish to the harbor, creating an exclusive market for the community. The crusty New England fishermen have all the work they can stand. The amphibians also appear to have some process for extracting gold from the ocean, or perhaps mining it somewhere. They keep a refinery going in the town, which supports everything.

It's beautiful, really, but no, H.P. has to make it a nightmare of foreign alien invasion, shading everything in that direction. The whole place smells "fishy"—an observation that only comes up 16 or 17 times. The strange and creepy "Innsmouth look" features eyes that never blink, narrow heads, scaly necks. The only clonking detail he might have missed is that they keep goldfish food sitting around in snack bowls. They are meant to frighten us, but first they are comical and then they just start to look like a lost opportunity to tell an interesting story about evolution. But, right, they frighten the clutched-up narrator, who desperately tries to figure out whether they are "Asiatic, Polynesian, Levantine, or negroid." The amphibians have a history of being horrible so, like aliens from outer space with their anal probes, they have to be taken as horrible to a certain degree on the story's terms. So horrible they are. They and their rubbery pursed lips have put the clampdown on Innsmouth, chasing away all the Christian churches (or even better, adapting them) and also starting their own, the Esoteric Order of Dagon. They don't like strangers in town, especially when the stranger talks to (and can understand the ludicrous dialect of) a 96-year-old alcoholic we see pound the best part of a quart of liquor (yeah, right). And they really don't like it when the stranger stays overnight, which our narrator never intended to do but, well, things happen.

And so to the night of terror, when the narrator's bus out that evening breaks down and he has to stay in the town hotel and battle fishy smells. It's not a bad action / adventure type of tale at this point, though I admit sometimes I got confused about the street names and directions and landmarks as the action went down. (The narrator gets all his information about the town from a grocery store clerk in the town First National, who helpfully draws him up a complicated map and tells him all the parts of town to avoid.) The point is, at the barest level, there are malevolent monster things after the narrator and he must get away in a not-so-merry chase, but all's well that ends well and he finds a way to beat it out of town unharmed. Well, there's still one more horrible revelation when the narrator begins to notice, years later, that he is less and less interested in blinking, but I'll leave you to find it for yourself. Again, turning this into a nightmare when it could be something so much more encompassing and immersive, squishy bio/body horror, and issues about species development, consciousness development, intelligence, adaptation. I mean, all that is here—there has to be fan fiction that takes it in its obvious LGBTQ+ implications to all kinds of much better and more interesting places. Lovecraft dreamed it up. But it's almost like he didn't really notice. I mean, they're interbreeding with us. They like us on some level. Maybe we should try liking them too. If I weren't so hinky about world-building fiction as a general thing, I might be tempted to look into it further. I might anyway.

H.P. Lovecraft, Tales (Library of America)
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"The Horror at Red Hook" (1927)

By the time I got to this story by H.P. Lovecraft I had accepted that all roads in horror fiction must presently pass through the Bard of Rhode Island. He died at 46, mostly neglected in his life, but is now considered one of the giants in the field—or, putting it another way, he used to be underrated and then he was overrated. Mostly he worked in the '20s and '30s and mostly he only wrote stories (my particular intersection), though some were more like short novels—the size of Heart of Darkness, say. A number of them created mythoses unto themselves (most famously Cthulhu but also the characters Erich Zann and Herbert West, "Fungi From Yuggoth," and an extensive so-called Dream Cycle). Extrapolations have since been assiduously worked by aspiring and established writers alike, and still are. It's certainly a type of influence, but at least in the realm of short stories it's hard for me to take such continuities as a particular strength, especially in horror. Then, in 2011, the Nigerian author Nnedi Okorafor won a World Fantasy Award for her novel Who Fears Death. The award at that time was a bust of Lovecraft and Okorafor went on to detail her mixed feelings, which reminded everyone that Lovecraft was a rank bigot and always had been. The evidence is in many of his stories.

This 2017 write-up of "The Horror at Red Hook" includes more details about Okorafor and fallout for the World Fantasy Award, and also spells out main problems with the story. In fact, as a result of articles like it (specifically this one from 2015, part of an invaluable series), I was led to believe that it's his most egregious, set in a Brooklyn well-populated with immigrants and swarthy foreigners. I wasn't reading it for that reason—I found it in the When Evil Wakes collection edited by August Derleth. Later I would come to Lovecraft's "The Rats in the Walls," which has a black cat with an extremely unfortunate name, and that seemed worse to me (or certainly more repulsively distracting) than anything in this story. The events recounted here are merely ridiculous, with its first scene for example a practical demonstration of a man reduced to abject terror at the sight of three-story brick buildings. Because of this man's extraordinary experience in a Brooklyn tenement, you see, taller brick buildings now apparently not only unnerve him but reduce him to gelatinous blathering insanity, at least until his field of vision can be altered. ("Yeah, right." That's me speaking aloud as I read.) Yet this turned out to be the story where Lovecraft's effects finally went to work on me.

"The Call of Cthulhu" (1928)

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H.P. Lovecraft's signature story takes a familiar route for horror fiction, making it about an investigation and certain key documents. Like Dracula or Jekyll & Hyde, it practically gets carried away with the conceit, creating busy thickets of circumstances. During a period of time in late March and early April, an artist is troubled by nightmare visions accompanied by strange hieroglyphics he doesn't understand but transcribes onto a clay bas-relief (because it was convenient?). He then takes this sculpture to a prominent professor of Semitic languages at Brown University, who is also his uncle. Uncle George recognizes the language and images from previous disturbing events in his life, which are then detailed. He also conducts a kind of survey and discovers that many people, especially artists, had similar dreams during that time. Slowly, the consistencies come into focus: the image of a hideous writhing head, the names "Cthulhu" and "R'lyeh," and a haunting phrase all the investigators interpret as "In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming." All the problems and pleasures I've had with Lovecraft are well represented here. The language is often stultifying, and the writing strategy hews uncomfortably close to word salad, relying on batteries of fantastic adjectives. Too often it tells rather than shows—even the showing is often a tiresome matter of telling too much detail. And the plotting is way too busy, a more general problem with horror of the past. Yet there's no denying a palpable sense of mounting dread oozing off this. Cthulhu is alien by definition—he is not of this planet, and never has been, though he has been connected with it longer than humanity itself has existed. It is not evil so much as infinitely cold and uncaring about humanity. He views us the way we view vermin. He can't quite stamp us out, but he's trying, and he's very powerful. It's hard to imagine what people thought when they encountered this story in a Weird Tales magazine in 1928. Frankly, it's hard for me to imagine that many even finished it. It's rather long, built out of big fat paragraphs with ponderous long sentences. It seems to do most of its work after the story is read and put away. It stretches the brain with its concepts of time. The hideous visage of Cthulhu is a bit like scenes from the 1933 King Kong movie, overdetermined yet vivid enough and redundant enough to get by the disbelief filters. Lovecraft's universe is vast, cold, and mostly empty, which isn't far from reality. The fact that there's a giant writhing octopus-head that means us no particular good lurking about the galaxies is unnerving in surprisingly penetrating ways.

The Complete Fiction of H.P. Lovecraft