(An Amazon review I wrote back at the turn of the century...)
Finally,
Howard Phillips Lovecraft seems to be getting some due from the
mainstream literary world. First it was that long
Joyce Carol Oates essay
from 1996 in the New York Review of Books, than it was the
"Annotated Lovecraft"
updates from Ballantine/Del Rey a couple years later, and now
Penguin Classics has seen fit
to bestow the American reading public with
The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories. Wow, I can't imagine what readers of Virginia Woolf, John Steinbeck, and T.S. Eliot will do when confronted with the
likes of Yog Sothoth, the Goat with a Thousand Young, The Great Old
Ones and that nasty ol' Cthulhu....
Seriously: this stuff is
incomparable. Lovecraft's creation of the Cthulhu Mythos (or "Yog-Sothothory" as he referred to it in a charming light-hearted moment) heralded a new age in supernatural
fiction. So vivid, so cosmic, so vast and imaginative, it is the equal
of Middle Earth, of Oz or Wonderland. HPL's view of humanity and the
cosmos is deeply, dark, nihilistic, and he used
symbolic structures of his neuroses—political, sexual, racial, dietary—to portray that view.
As for the
stories themselves, the cornerstones are "The Call of Cthulhu"
(1926) and "The Colour Out of Space" (1927); they will still be read a
hundred years hence for their controlled atmosphere of cosmic dread
and awe. His skill at evoking a slowly dawning sense of terror is
unparalleled in these tales. "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" (1931)—not too
shabbily adapted in a 2002 film as
Dagon—and "The Whisperer in Darkness" (1934) are later stories that are a bit wordy but still
powerful, unsettling, and unforgettable. Man's place in the cosmos is
revealed as paltry and inconsequential; his physical being rendered as
mutated and degraded. Space and time become meaningless. The climactic chills will remain with you
for ages.
Others in this collection include "Rats in the Walls," "The
Outsider" and "The Hound." The latter two reveal his penchant for
evoking Poe all too derivatively (although the erstwhile
Poppy Z. Brite
wrote a reverent Goth-punk update of "The Hound," "And His Mouth Will
Taste of Wormwood"); "Rats" is one of his major early works, the artist coming into his own.
Lovecraft forced horror and supernatural fiction out of its old world
infancy of vampires, ghosts, and devils and into the adult, modern world
of a cold, uncaring, nearly malicious universe that we can scarcely
comprehend. While Lovecraft's prose at times leaves much to be desired,
the power of his imaginings is unique and convincing. This collection
belongs on the bookshelf of serious readers everywhere.
S.T. Joshi is a
marvelous editor and biographer of Lovecraft, and his efforts should
not go unheeded. Kudos to Penguin for finally adding H.P. Lovecraft to
their catalog of Twentieth Century Classics.
