(Dagon is a short story by American author H. P. Lovecraft...)
Dagon is a short story by American author H. P. Lovecraft. It was written in July 1917 and is one of the first stories that Lovecraft wrote as an adult.
(In Beyond the Wall of Sleep, an intern in a mental hospit...)
In Beyond the Wall of Sleep, an intern in a mental hospital relates his experiences with Joe Slater, a backward Catskills mountain man and now an inmate at a hospital for the criminally insane. The inmate was having very strange and vivid dreams which he described in a way seemingly impossible for a man of his limited intellect.
(The Statement of Randolph Carter is the first-person test...)
The Statement of Randolph Carter is the first-person testimony of the titular character, who has been found wandering through swampland in an amnesiac shock. In his statement, Carter attempts to explain the disappearance of his companion, the occultist Harley Warren.
(The Nameless City of the story's title is an ancient ruin...)
The Nameless City of the story's title is an ancient ruin located somewhere in the deserts of the Arabian Peninsula, and is older than any human civilization. In ancient times, the Nameless City was built and inhabited by an unnamed race of reptiles with a body shaped like a cross between a crocodile and a seal with a strange head common to neither, involving a protruding forehead, horns, lack of a nose, and an alligator-like jaw.
(One of Lovecraft's early stories. Max Finn rooms at a run...)
One of Lovecraft's early stories. Max Finn rooms at a rundown rooming house and does not know his fellow boarders, but one sad, mute street musician named Erich Zann, gets his attention. Each night, the old man plays haunting melodies on his violins. Melodies that plague Finn’s dreams and give him nightmares about an impossible cosmic land ruled by Nyarlathotep, the messenger of the elder gods.
(Grave robbing as an art form never really caught on. H.P....)
Grave robbing as an art form never really caught on. H.P. Lovecraft takes us into the last moments of a robber of graves who found far more than he bargained for. It is definitely best to let some sleeping dogs lie.
(The story was inspired by Lovecraft's first trip to Marbl...)
The story was inspired by Lovecraft's first trip to Marblehead, Massachusetts, in December 1922. Lovecraft later called that visit the most powerful single emotional climax experienced during my nearly forty years of existence.
(In this work, a mysterious man who has been living alone ...)
In this work, a mysterious man who has been living alone in a castle for as long as he can remember decides to break free in search of human contact and light.
(The narrator offers a story to explain why a draught of c...)
The narrator offers a story to explain why a draught of cool air is the most detestable thing to him. His tale begins in the spring of 1923, when he was looking for housing in New York City. He finally settles in a converted brownstone on West Fourteenth Street.
(For many years, the narrator and his uncle, Dr. Elihu Whi...)
For many years, the narrator and his uncle, Dr. Elihu Whipple, have nurtured a fascination with an old abandoned house on Benefit Street. Dr. Whipple has made extensive records tracking the mysterious, yet apparently coincidental, sickness, and death of many who have lived in the house for over a hundred years. They are also puzzled by the strange weeds growing in the yard, as well as an unexplained foul smell and whitish phosphorescent fungi growing in the cellar.
(The Dunwich Horror is a story by Howard Phillips Lovecraf...)
The Dunwich Horror is a story by Howard Phillips Lovecraft. It takes place in Dunwich, a fictional town in Massachusetts. It is considered one of the core stories of the Cthulhu Mythos.
(That is not dead that can eternal lie And with strange ae...)
That is not dead that can eternal lie And with strange aeons even death may die Millenia ago, the Old Ones ruled our planet. Since that time, they have but slumbered. But when a massive sea tremor brings the ancient stone city of R'lyeh to the surface once more, the Old Ones awaken at last.
(Trapped in an act of revenge by an angry ex-friend, a man...)
Trapped in an act of revenge by an angry ex-friend, a man finds himself hunted by creatures from other dimensions and forced to survive by wit and will.
(Innsmouth is a dilapidated seaside town with secrets as a...)
Innsmouth is a dilapidated seaside town with secrets as a hybrid race of half-human and half-amphibian creatures worship the gods of Cthulhu and Dagon.
(The Shadow Out of Time indirectly tells of the Great Race...)
The Shadow Out of Time indirectly tells of the Great Race of Yith, an extraterrestrial species with the ability to travel through space and time. The Yithians accomplish this by switching bodies with hosts from the intended spatial or temporal destination. The story implies that the effect, when seen from the outside, is similar to spiritual possession.
(The story takes place in Providence, Rhode Island, and re...)
The story takes place in Providence, Rhode Island, and revolves around the Church of Starry Wisdom. The cult uses an ancient artifact known as the Shining Trapezohedron to summon a terrible being from the depths of time and space.
(The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories present...)
The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories presents the definitive corrected texts of these works, along with Lovecraft critic and biographer S. T. Joshi's illuminating introduction and notes to each story.
(Azathoth is a deity in the Cthulhu Mythos and Dream Cycle...)
Azathoth is a deity in the Cthulhu Mythos and Dream Cycle stories of writer H. P. Lovecraft and other authors. He is the ruler of the Outer Gods. When age fell upon the world, and wonder went out of the minds of men, when grey cities reared to smoky skies tall towers grim and ugly, in whose shadow none might dream of the sun or of spring’s flowering meads, when learning stripped the earth of her mantle of beauty, and poets sang no more save of twisted phantoms seen with bleared and inward-looking eyes, when these things had come to pass, and childish hopes had gone away forever, there was a man who travelled out of life on a quest into the spaces whether the world’s dreams had fled.
(Randolph Carter dreams three times of a majestic sunset c...)
Randolph Carter dreams three times of a majestic sunset city, but each time he is abruptly snatched away before he can see it up close. When he prays to the gods of dream to reveal the whereabouts of the phantasmal city, they do not answer, and his dreams of the city stop altogether. Undaunted, Carter resolves to go to Kadath, where the gods live, to beseech them in person.
(Frequently imitated and widely influential, Howard Philip...)
Frequently imitated and widely influential, Howard Philips Lovecraft reinvented the horror genre in the 1920s, discarding ghosts and witches and instead envisioning mankind as a tiny outpost of dwindling sanity in a chaotic and malevolent universe.
Necronomicon: The Best Weird Tales of H. P. Lovecraft
(This handsome leatherbound tome collects together the ver...)
This handsome leatherbound tome collects together the very best of Lovecraft's tales of terror, including the complete Cthulhu Mythos cycle, just the way they were originally published. It will introduce a whole new generation of readers to Lovecraft's fiction, as well as being a must-buy for those fans who want all his work in a single, definitive, highly attractive volume.
H. P. Lovecraft was an American writer and the most important literary supernaturalist of the twentieth century. He was one of the greatest in a line of authors that originated with the Gothic novelists of the eighteenth century and was perpetuated throughout the nineteenth century by such figures as Edgar Allan Poe, Ambrose Bierce, J. Sheridan LeFanu, and Arthur Machen.
Background
H. P. Lovecraft, in full Howard Phillips Lovecraft was born on August 20, 1890 in Providence, Rhode Island, United States at the home of his maternal grandfather, Whipple V. Phillips, New England gentleman who was the dominant intellectual influence on his grandson's early life, both personally and through his extensive library of works by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century authors. Lovecraft's father, Winfield Scott Lovecraft, a syphilitic traveling salesman who was effectively a stranger to his son, died in 1898 after spending the last five years of his life institutionalized with general paresis. Lovecraft's grandfather died in 1904, and subsequent ill-management of his financial holdings forced Sarah Phillips Lovecraft and her only child to move from their family home into a nearby duplex.
Education
A precocious child whose delicate health allowed him only sporadic attendance at the Slater Avenue School, Lovecraft flourished in a world of cultured adults who fostered his interest in Greco-Roman antiquity, astronomy, eighteenth-century literature and history, and Gothic tales of terror.
Lovecraft began to produce hectographed journals, The Scientific Gazette (1899–1907) and The Rhode Island Journal of Astronomy (1903–07), for distribution amongst his friends. When he entered Hope Street High School, he found both his teachers and peers congenial and encouraging, and he developed a number of long-lasting friendships with boys of his age. Lovecraft’s first appearance in print occurred in 1906, when he wrote a letter on an astronomical matter to The Providence Sunday Journal. Shortly thereafter he began writing a monthly astronomy column for The Pawtuxet Valley Gleaner, a rural paper; he later wrote columns for The Providence Tribune (1906–08) and The Providence Evening News (1914–18), as well as The Asheville (N.C.) Gazette-News (1915).
In 1908 Lovecraft suffered a nervous breakdown that prevented his attaining enough credits to graduate from high school, and, rather than entering Brown University to pursue the professorship that he had formerly assumed would occupy the rest of his life, he continued his program of self-education.
During the early period Lovecraft in large part existed as a semi-invalid recluse. In 1914 his isolation was alleviated when he joined the United Amateur Press Association, a group of nonprofessional writers who produced a variety of publications and exchanged letters. A voluminous writer from an early age, Lovecraft now directed his efforts toward these amateur journals, with his own magazine, the Conservative, appearing from 1915 to 1923. He also became involved in a network of correspondence which for the rest of his life provided a major outlet for personal and artistic expression. Lovecraft's contributions to amateur journals were almost exclusively in the form of poems and essays.
Although Lovecraft wrote several horror stories after his first reading in 1898 of the tales of Poe, he destroyed most of these efforts and wrote no fiction from 1908 to 1917. In the latter years he was encouraged by editor W. Paul Cook to resume fiction writing, resulting in the successive composition of The Tomb and Dagon, the first of what were considered Lovecraft's mature works. After further encouragement, these two stories, along with three others, were submitted to the pulp magazine Weird Tales, which afterward became the principal publisher of Lovecraft's fiction during his lifetime.
In 1924 Lovecraft went to live with his wife in New York where he hoped to find employment that would enable him to abandon the disagreeable and insubstantial living he previously earned as a literary reviser and ghostwriter. In 1926, Lovecraft returned to Providence, where he lived for the remainder of his life. To supplement his dwindling inheritance he was forced to continue his revision work. Despite his nearly destitute financial state, Lovecraft managed to travel extensively, documenting these excursions in his letters and in such essays as Vermont: A First Impression, Charleston, and A Description and Guide to the City of Quebeck.
When Lovecraft died of intestinal cancer at the age of forty-six, the bulk of his writings remained either scattered in magazines or unpublished. Later Lovecraft's friends and fellow writers August Derleth and Donald Wandrei brought his writings to a wide readership. Establishing the publishing house of Arkham expressly to bring Lovecraft's work into book form, Derleth and Wandrei edited such early collections as The Outsiders and Others in 1939 and Beyond the Wall of Sleep in 1943.
During his lifetime Lovecraft's work appeared almost exclusively in pulp magazines, and only since his death in 1937 has it received a wide readership and critical analysis.
Lovecraft adopted the stance of atheism early in life. In 1932, he wrote in a letter to Robert E. Howard: "All I say is that I think it is damned unlikely that anything like a central cosmic will, a spirit world, or an eternal survival of personality exist. They are the most preposterous and unjustified of all the guesses which can be made about the universe, and I am not enough of a hairsplitter to pretend that I don't regard them as arrant and negligible moonshine. In theory, I am an agnostic, but pending the appearance of radical evidence I must be classed, practically and provisionally, as an atheist."
Politics
Lovecraft was a conservative in a very literal sense. He wasn't focused in the politics of his time, but on preserving the politics of an age which he felt was more dignified and safe. "I really am a relic left over from Queen Anne’s age. I do not know how it came about, but from the time of my earliest recollection, I have seemed to fall into the mental habits of two centuries ago."
His thoughts on race and fascism would align him with Hitler, whom Lovecraft supported at the end of his life.
Views
Philosophically, Lovecraft was a strict scientific materialist who held that the universe is a mechanical assemblage of forces wherein all values are simply fabrications having no validity outside the context of human imagination and that humanity itself is merely an evanescent phenomenon without any specialdimension of soul or spirit to distinguish it from other forms of animate or inanimate matter.
At the same time Lovecraft wrote that his strongest feelings were connected with a sense of unknown realms outside human experience, an irrationally perceived mystery and meaning beyond the world of crude appearances. It is particularly this tension between Lovecraft's sterile scientism and mystic imagination-whose contradictory relationship he always recognized and relished-that critics find is the source of the highly original character of his work.
Quotations:
"No one is more acutely conscious than I of the inadequacy of my work. I am a self-confessed amateur and bungler, and have not much hope of improvement."
"In 1914, when the kindly hand of amateurdom was first extended to me, I was as close to the state of vegetation as any animal well can be... With the advent of the United I obtained a renewal to live; a renewed sense of existence as other than a superfluous weight; and found a sphere in which I could feel that my efforts were not wholly futile. For the first time I could imagine that my clumsy gropings after art were a little more than faint cries lost in the unlistening world."
"Sometimes I stumble accidentally on rare combinations of slope, curved street-line, roofs & gables & chimneys, & accessory details of verdure & background, which in the magic of late afternoon assume a mystic majesty & exotic significance beyond the power of words to describe.... All that I live for is to capture some fragment of this hidden & unreachable beauty; this beauty which is all of dream, yet which I feel I have known closely & revelled in through long aeons before my birth or the birth of this or any other world." (about New England)
"Yes-my New England is a dream New England-the familiar scene with certain lights and shadows heightened (or meant to be heightened) just enough to merge it with things beyond the world."
"As to what is meant by 'weird' - and of course weirdness is by no means confined to horror - I should say that the real criterion is a strong impression of the suspension of natural laws or the presence of unseen worlds or forces close at hand."
"I preach & practice an extreme conservatism in art forms, society, & politics, as the only means of averting the ennui, despair, & confusion of a guideless & standardless struggle with unveiled chaos."
"Doubtless I am the sort of shock-purveyor condemned by critics of the urbane tradition as decadent or culturally immature; but I can't resist the fascination of the outside's mythical shadowland, & I really have a fairly respectable line of literary predecessors to back me up."
Personality
Critical reaction to Lovecraft's work displays an unusual diversity, from exasperated attacks upon what are judged to be the puerile ravings of an artistic and intellectual incompetent to celebrations of Lovecraft as one of the greatest writers and thinkers of the modern era. His severest detractors regard him as an isolated neurotic, and even something of an imbecile, whose writings merely betray a pathetic estrangement from the concerns of adult society. For the most part admitting Lovecraft's eccentricity, his defenders find in his fiction, and more obviously in the five volumes of his Selected Letters, a complex vision of reality which could only be formed by a mind of exceptional independence.
Quotes from others about the person
August Derleth: "Lovecraft was an original in the Gothic tradition; he was a skilled writer of supernatural fiction, a master of the macabre who had no peer in the America of his time."
Ursula Le Guin: "Lovecraft was an exceptionally, almost impeccably, bad writer. .. . Derivative, inept, and callow, his tales can satisfy only those who believe that a capital letter, some words, and a full stop make a sentence."
Donald Burleson: "The horror, ultimately, in a Lovecraft tale is not some gelatinous lurker in dark places, but rather the realization, by the characters involved, of their helplessness and their insignificance in the scheme of things-their terribly ironic predicament of being sufficiently well-developed organisms to perceive and feel the poignancy of their own motelike unimportance in a blind and chaotic universe which neither loves them nor even finds them worthy of notice, let alone hatred or hostility."
Schweitzer: "Lovecraft was uniquely able to link the inner substance of former spiritual beliefs with the most recent scientific discoveries. He used a rational, mechanistic context to get his readers to the edge of the abyss-and then dropped them over. The result was an irrational horror grimmer than anything a Puritan could conjure up."
Interests
grotesque and fantastic art, astronomy, writers of horror
Writers
Edgar Allan Poe
Connections
In 1921 Lovecraft met Sonia H. Greene, a Russian Jewish businesswoman from New York City. They married in 1924, but separated ten months later.