Review: H.P. Lovecraft

There's a reason why fans of the genre don't take kindly to criticism of H.P. Lovecraft. It was a different time, they'll argue, or, You just have to separate the art from the artist. I had never quite understood the rabid loyalty with which readers insist on idolizing the man, but now that I've read him, I kind of do.

Lovecraft's an incredible writer. He is. His work was groundbreaking, exquisitely written, and foundational to the genres of horror and dark fantasy. Do I think he ought to be cut out of the canon and removed from class syllabi everywhere? Of course not.

But that doesn't mean we can't walk and chew gum at the same time.

Was H.P. Lovecraft a raging white supremacist? Yes. Does his work have literary merit that deserves to be studied by aspiring writers in the genre? Also yes. Is it possible to analyze both the literary merit and the white supremacist overtones in his work at the same time? Also also yes.

Got that?

Then let's begin.

Some literary merits:

In reading three of Lovecraft's short stories—"The Call of Cthulhu," "The Outsider," and "Pickman's Model"—I was struck by how well the stories held up to almost a century of changing literary style and how effectively they managed to evoke fear and dread in me despite flaunting several well-established tenets of modern fiction-writing.

At this point in literary history, you'd be hard pressed to find a writer who hasn't yet heard the maxim, "Show, don't tell." We've all been told a thousand times, if you have the choice between featuring the action of your story in a scene (where the reader experiences the action alongside the characters) or retrospectively through a narrative (where the narrator recounts the characters' experiences to the reader after the fact), always choose the scene.

Sure, it's a matter of preference, and one that has changed over time. It may not have been as ubiquitous a "rule" of writing in 1925 as it is today, but I'm not sure it's just a generous historicism that allows me to immerse myself in Lovecraft's worlds. Yet only "The Outsider" was told in anything approximating scenes—and one could make a pretty compelling argument that this story still tells more than it shows of our undead narrator discovering the horror of his own reflection. The other two stories are told even more explicitly as narratives rather than scene-based stories, with "Pickman's Model" told as a second person account from the narrator to his grandson, and "The Call of Cthulhu" told from an even further remove.

This latter story comes to us readers in the words of an unnamed narrator who uncovers the existence of the monster Cthulhu via his dead grand-uncle's papers: letters, notes, news clippings, and a diary—which the narrator kindly paraphrases for us rather than copy out the action verbatim. Yet even through these many layers, all of which should (as the theory goes) have the function of filtering out some of the excitement, distancing the reader from the events taking place, the story still left me more unsettled than almost any other we've read this term.

Again, it's possible that my reading has been subconsciously colored by the knowledge that the writing is closing on a century old. Just as I'm more forgiving of cheesy effects in movies from the 70's and 80's, so too am I more capable of reading past the antiquated writing styles of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. But. I'd like to think it's more than that.

I'll attribute part of Lovecraft's effectiveness to his imagination. His ideas are brilliant. Twisted, frightening, vivid. Especially "The Outsider"—what a fever dream it reads as, to imagine a lost soul climbing up and up through the dark and the slime just to discover that he's already dead—and has been that way a long, long time. It's not just the ideas, though. I think credit has to go to the prose as well. It's beautiful. Lyrical and poetic, it reads aloud like music. As someone with an ear for cadence and rhythm, I can tell you that nothing delights me better. And yet.

And yet. There are choppy sections. Awkward ones, too. He forces certain words into his narratives, certain adjectives, dark and laden with meaning yet intended to modify not monsters but men. "Mongrel," "mulatto," "half-caste," he calls them, in sentences that ring false to the ear. They're not words that add to his poetry, not words where the story might hinge. They stick out, ugly and crude—and not just to the poet's ear.

Because the "Negroes" and "primitives" and "degenerates" were not descriptions born in fantasy for Lovecraft. He described non-"Nordic" peoples as "swarthy" and "untrustworthy" and "evil" not the way he described Cthulhu as "gelatinous" but the way he described his Boston streets. These characteristics were facts for Lovecraft, elements of his everyday world the way ships have masts and colonial houses have bricks. His xenophobia and racist bigotry are well documented—by his own pen as well as by others. I'm not here to provide an exhaustive summary, only to say that we do a disservice to ourselves and to the genre if we refuse to read his work with nuance.

Lovecraft's white supremacist ideas are woven into the fabric of his stories just as he weaves his settings, his atmosphere, his lore. Over and over, he suggests that "Nordic men" are the only rational men, the only men capable of exploration and comprehension, while every character who wishes ill, who acts in malice or "orgiastic license" is without exception assigned a non-white racial classification.

We can't ignore it. We shouldn't ignore it. It doesn't mean we shouldn't read Lovecraft. What it does mean is that we must read Lovecraft while keeping in mind the fundamental truth that words have power. As writers, we play God. We have the choice to reinforce the existing balance of power, or we can re-write the rules and bend reality to our whims. Either way, we create worlds with our words. So what will you do with yours?