Howard Phillips Lovecraft was born in Providence, Rhode Island, on August 20, 1890, and spent almost his entire life within a few miles of where he started. His father died in an asylum. His mother followed, after telling him for years that he was hideous. He was raised by aunts, educated erratically, never finished high school, and lived on a dwindling family inheritance until it ran out.
He sold stories to Weird Tales and similar magazines for a fraction of a cent per word. He died of intestinal cancer in 1937, aged forty-six, having published no book with a major house. His estate was worth almost nothing.
Ninety years later his invented mythology is a permanent fixture of the culture, and the adjective made from his name describes a category of fear that didn’t exist before him.
No writer on my shelf makes me more uneasy than Lovecraft. The prose can be overripe and the man’s views are ugly on the page, and he still came up with the one horror idea of the last century that frightens me at the level of thought. I can’t dismiss him and I won’t defend him, and that tension is the most useful place to read him from.
The disproportion between the life and the legacy is the strangest thing about him. He earned almost nothing, published in magazines that folded, was known to a few dozen correspondents, and died believing he’d failed. His invented gods are now in video games, films, board games and casual conversation.
He also never wrote a novel. The body of work is short stories and a handful of novellas, produced across roughly seventeen years, and the entire mythology sits inside that. Very few writers have exerted this much influence from so little material.
He was also astonishingly young when the best of it was written. The stories that built the mythology came in a burst through his late thirties, and he was dead before he turned fifty.
The money situation was worse than poor. He lived on a shrinking inheritance, ate badly to make it last, and at points was surviving on tinned food he could buy in bulk. The family collapse behind that’s worth stating because the fiction is soaked in it. His father was committed to a psychiatric hospital when he was three and died there five years later. His mother was committed to the same hospital and died there when he was twenty-nine.
He grew up in his grandfather’s house, a wealthy household, until the grandfather died and the money went. The family moved to smaller and smaller quarters. He watched an inherited position dissolve entirely across his adolescence. That’s a subject that recurs in his fiction to an almost obsessive degree. He never finished high school, having suffered what he later called a nervous breakdown, and abandoned his plan to study astronomy at Brown. He spent the next several years largely housebound, reading and writing letters. His route back was amateur journalism, a real national network of hobbyist writers producing their own magazines, which he found in his twenties and which gave him an audience, correspondents and eventually a professional market.
That’s the whole architecture of his career: no institution, no publisher, no money, and a self-organized community of amateurs that carried him and then carried his work after he was gone.
What did Lovecraft invent?
It’s the argument that the universe isn’t hostile to us, which would at least be a relationship, but indifferent, and that discovering this is what breaks a person.
Every horror tradition before it assumed a moral universe. A ghost wants something. A cross can repel a vampire. That implies the cross means something. A monster is a punishment, a curse, or a consequence, and the horror is a disturbance in an order that holds.
Lovecraft removed the order. His entities aren’t evil, because evil requires caring about humans enough to oppose them. They’re enormous, old, and unaware of us in the way we’re unaware of the bacteria on a doorknob. The terror is that your existence isn’t a variable in anything they do. That idea disturbs me in a way no ghost ever has. A monster that hates you is almost comforting, because hatred means you matter. Indifference from something vast is a colder fear, and it’s the one that stays with me after the book’s closed. That’s new. It’s also, unlike most horror premises, unfalsifiable by the reader’s own life. That’s why it’s outlasted every monster of its period.
Why does Lovecraft’s withholding technique still work?
Because he built the whole method around withholding, and withholding doesn’t date. His creatures are almost never described directly. The narrator reports being unable to describe them, or describes the reaction instead of the thing, or supplies a partial account and then breaks off. Geometry is wrong. Angles don’t behave. Somebody who saw it’s now in an institution and won’t discuss it.
Modern readers sometimes take this as a failure of nerve or vocabulary. It’s neither. A described monster has a size and a shape, and a shape can be measured against the reader’s courage. The reader’s own imagination completes an undescribed one. That will always assemble something more specific to their fear than any author could.
Every time a modern horror film spends its budget on a close-up of the creature, the scene stops frightening me. Lovecraft understood that a reader’s imagination is a better effects department than any studio can pay for, and writers who describe every scale and tooth are doing the reader’s work badly.
This is the same principle behind the strongest work on the supernatural list, and the reason Stoker keeps Dracula offstage for most of his own novel. Presence isn’t pressure.
Why are Lovecraft’s narrators academics?
His narrators are academics, antiquarians and researchers, and the stories are framed as reports.
Somebody is reading a professor’s papers after his death. Somebody is submitting a statement to the authorities. Somebody is explaining, carefully and with citations, why they’re about to do something drastic. The prose is deliberately dry, the tone is scholarly, and the horror arrives as a conclusion drawn from evidence.
That framing does specific work. A scholar reporting an impossibility is more convincing than a frightened person describing one, because the reader trusts the tone. It also lets him build dread through accumulation, since a researcher assembling documents can spend twenty pages establishing that something is wrong before anything happens. He borrowed the found-document approach from the gothic tradition and pointed it somewhere new. Where Stoker used documents to create uncertainty about events, Lovecraft used them to create certainty about something the reader would prefer to doubt.
Why did other writers build on Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos?
He let other writers use his material, and that decision is the reason the mythos exists.
Lovecraft corresponded constantly, writing an estimated tens of thousands of letters, and he encouraged his correspondents to borrow his names, his invented books and his entities. They wrote them into their own stories and invented additions he then used back. The mythology grew as a collaboration between a dozen pulp writers, most of whom nobody remembers.
After his death, August Derleth founded a publishing house largely to keep the work in print, systematized the mythos into something more orderly than Lovecraft ever intended, and preserved a body of work that would otherwise have gone out of print with the magazines. The lesson for a writer is unglamorous and real. An open world outlives a closed one. A setting other people are allowed to build in acquires contributors, and contributors keep a thing alive long after its author can’t.
This is the part of his story I find moving. A broke man in Providence handed his creations to anyone who wanted them, and that generosity kept his work alive. Writers who guard every name and creature like a trade secret have it backwards, because a world nobody else is allowed into dies with its owner.
How did New England shape Lovecraft’s fiction?
He almost never left New England, and the work is built out of that limitation. Lovecraft invented an entire fictional geography stacked on top of Massachusetts and Rhode Island: Arkham, Innsmouth, Dunwich, Miskatonic University and the river it sits on. They’re not generic horror towns. They’re recognizably that region, with its decaying mill economy, its old families, its coastline and its particular quality of neglect.
The two years he spent in New York were miserable and produced some of his ugliest writing. He went home to Providence and the work improved immediately.
There’s something usable in that for any writer worried about a narrow life. He had one region, an erratic education and almost no travel, and he built a mythology out of the specific instead of the broad. A place known deeply generates more material than a dozen places seen briefly, and the detail that persuades a reader is almost never the detail a visitor would notice.
How many letters did Lovecraft write?
By most estimates he wrote somewhere between sixty and a hundred thousand letters. That dwarfs the fiction by an enormous margin.
He corresponded with a network of amateur writers, many of them young and unpublished, and he treated their work seriously. Robert Bloch, who later wrote Psycho, was a teenager writing to him. Robert E. Howard, who created Conan, was a regular correspondent. He revised other people’s manuscripts, sometimes so heavily that the result was closer to collaboration, and charged little or nothing.
In effect, he was running an unpaid workshop by mail for a decade, while broke, while ill, and while his own career went nowhere.
That unpaid workshop is what I find hardest to reconcile with the rest of the biography. The man whose fiction is preoccupied with contamination and outsiders spent his life generously mentoring strangers, and both of those are documented in the same correspondence.
For a working writer there’s a practical observation underneath the contradiction. The network he built by letter is why the mythology survived. When the magazines folded and the stories went out of print, the people who kept them alive were correspondents who felt they had a stake in the material. Community outlasts a publisher.
That decade of unpaid mentoring by mail is the part of him I admire without reservation. He answered teenagers as if their stories mattered and marked up manuscripts for nothing while his own work went nowhere. Plenty of successful writers never give that much to anyone.
What do you do with the ugliness in Lovecraft?
Lovecraft was a racist, and not in the diffuse way that lets a defender say everyone was then.
His letters and several stories contain views that his own contemporaries found excessive. Some of the fiction is unreadable on this basis. And the racism isn’t detachable from the horror, because a significant part of what frightens his narrators is contamination, degeneration, and the discovery of impure ancestry. The fear of the outsider and the fear of the cosmos run through the same channel.
There’s no clean resolution to offer. He invented something valuable and that the invention is entangled with something ugly, and a reader has to decide what to do with that themselves.
What has happened since is more interesting than either dismissing or excusing him. Writers with exactly the ancestry he feared have taken the mythos and turned it around, using cosmic indifference to write about the human variety, and that body of work is now real. A mythology open enough for his friends to build in turned out to be open enough for his opposites.
Why do Lovecraft adaptations mostly fail?
Because the thing that makes the stories work is the refusal to show, and film exists to show. Put a creature on screen and it’s a budget, a texture and a silhouette. The indescribable becomes a costume. The most successful adaptations tend to be the ones that abandon the material and keep the atmosphere, or that use his ideas without his plots. His influence on film is enormous and almost entirely indirect. The dread in Alien is closer to Lovecraft than most direct adaptations manage, and it gets there by borrowing the posture toward the universe instead of the tentacles. Alien gets closer to him than a dozen films with his name on the poster, and that tells you how badly the direct adaptations miss. They keep chasing the tentacles, and what makes him frightening is the silence of the universe. No creature shop can build that.
What can a writer take from Lovecraft?
Four things, and the ugliness of the man doesn’t cancel any of them.
Withhold the monster. What the reader supplies is always worse than what you can write, and a described creature can be measured while an undescribed one can’t.
Choose the tone that makes the impossible credible. A dry academic account of something absurd is more persuasive than a hysterical account of something plausible.
Find the fear underneath the fear. Cosmic horror works because indifference is more frightening than malice, and locating that second-order fear is the difference between a monster and a premise. Build something other people can add to. He gave his material away and it survived him by a century. Very few closed properties manage that.
How should you mark H.P. Lovecraft Day?
Read The Colour Out of Space. It’s the best entry point and the one where the withholding is most complete. Then The Shadow Over Innsmouth if you want the full method, including the parts that will make you uncomfortable for reasons the author didn’t intend.
If you write, do the exercise. Take the scariest thing in your current project and remove every direct description of it. Report only the reactions, the aftermath and the refusals to speak. Then see whether the scene got weaker or considerably stronger.
Read him this year with your eyes open. The ugliness is real and it’s on the page, and so is the only new idea horror got in a hundred years. I want readers to wrestle with both, and I don’t accept either one as a reason to skip him. For the rest of the gothic and horror tradition I’ve written about Frankenstein Day, Edgar Allan Poe, Bram Stoker and Anne Rice.