Heart pumping, eye watering, joint stiffening, and mind freezing are all phrases, along with many more, that precede a certain word. A word that holds complete control over all other emotions and physical actions, that word is fear. Unlike any other emotion anything can feel, fear seems to hold a special place in our hearts.
Even though we try our best to avoid being scared, we always find ourselves watching horror movies, or reading Stephen King before bed. Then we end up kicking ourselves over a terrible saga of nightmares that interrupt our sleep. And yet one man by the name of Howard Phillips Lovecraft seemed to understand fear more than most people for his time.
Hugely influential to those who have read his work or studied his life, Lovecraft reinvented the horror genre in the early twentieth century. Straying from the usual ghosts and goblins, Lovecraft instead called down demons from the stars, gods from other realms, and made man a sheer flame that is easily extinguishable. Yet even though he was a master of evoking cosmic fear, Lovecraft never forgot where he was from and seemed to be possessed his whole life with the spirit of his birthplace, Providence, Rhode Island.
Born in 1890, and dying in 1937 with the words “I Am Providence” forever engraved on his tombstone, H.P. Lovecraft lived a short life of weirdness and obscurity. With the unfortunate experience of losing his father to insanity, Lovecraft was left to be raised by his mother, two aunts, and his maternal grandfather, Whipple Van Buren Phillips.
After the death of his beloved grandfather, he fell into depression, especially after being forced to move from his birth home. It was then he experienced a nervous breakdown causing him to leave school. He was a virtual hermit between 1908 and 1913, devoting most of his time to personal studies and letters.
It wasn’t until 1917 that he returned to writing fiction after being urged by friends like W. Paul Cook and others who had read his work. That summer “The Tomb” and “Dagon” were written, thus beginning a sometimes rocky career as a writer of strange fiction that pumped out and submitted a lot of his work to magazines like Weird Tales, and other strange fiction magazines. The next couple of years were particularly rough for Lovecraft. He suffered the loss of his mother, and tried to recover with a marriage to a fellow writer named Sonia Greene. However Lovecraft was not happy in the big city and became extremely xenophobic toward the integrated culture.
In stories like “The Horror at Red Hook”, and “He”, Lovecraft clearly shows with venom his distaste for foreign blood mixing with the Anglo Saxon blood line. His discomfort for the overpopulated city not only affected his writing but also his relationship with his wife.
To help deal with a rocky marriage, and to cure his yearning for Providence, Lovecraft quickly moved home in 1926 and produced what some consider to be his most amazing work. W. Paul Cook wrote of Lovecraft’s New York “exile”, “He had been tried in the fire and came out pure gold.” “Call of Cthulhu,” “Color out of Space,” “Whisperer in Darkness,” At the Mountains of Madness and many more were born to contribute to his mythos.
Yet even though he created most of his best work from that point till his death, he was rarely paid and if he was, it was for very little, causing him to devote a lot of his skills to ghostwriting for other authors to make money to survive. Unfortunately it wasn’t until many years after his death till all his stories were compiled correctly and published.
Although he suffered from random illnesses and frequent debilitating cold spells, it was intestinal cancer that finally took him March 15th, 1937. Luckily from all the close friendships acquired through his correspondence, his precious works were salvaged and preserved. August Derleth and Donald Wandrei founded Arkham House and finally published all of his unpublished material in books like The Outsider and Others in 1939.
Since, his legacy has lived on in literature, movies, and music thanks a great deal to his Cthulhu Mythos and creations like The Necronomicon. With guest appearances of Cthulhu on shows like South Park, and live action adaptations of his stories being turned into films just in time for a new Lovecraftian boom here to amaze readers all over again.
The sanity blasting approach to his writing has at times been controversial, especially in his time, which was something that has helped people recognize him as a master of horror in general. With his blended style of Edgar Allan Poe, and Lord Dunsany, Lovecraft was able to bring down demons and creatures from the outer reaches of the ether.
He expelled any Christian references with the creation of “Other Gods” and “Elder Ones” that are not dead but sleeping and dreaming of the day they take over earth once more. With lines like, “That is not dead which can eternal lie. And with strange aeons even death may die,” Lovecraft gives his creations a sense of chilling foreboding that never quite escapes his readers.
Lovecraft’s mastership of the sense of fear is best summed up in a quote by the man himself, “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” When we are faced with situations that our minds can’t quite process neither quickly nor properly, that is when we feel fear. Lovecraft knew this and thus still remains a crowned king of fear. So the next time you’re lying in bed, gripping the covers, and staring at the ceiling in tense fear from the nightmare you just woke from, you can give good ol’ Howie Lovecraft a slice of credit. But thinking of him might just dredge up more dread.
Sources
- HPLOVECRAFT.COM
- HPPODCRAFT.COM - H.P. Lovecraft Literary Podcast.
- S.T. Joshi. The Call of Cthulhu and Other Stories / H.P Lovecraft; Edited With an Introduction and Notes By S.T. Joshi. Strand, London: Penguin Books Ltd, 1999
David Leingang - Reporting from Bismarck, North Dakota. Hi my name is David Leingang, and have been a resident of Bismarck for about 11 or so years. I have ...
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