The Crucial Lovecraft

(c) 2006 Ramsey Campbell

The fathers of the modern horror story are Poe in America and Le Fanu in Britain, both of whom refined Gothic methods to produce some of the greatest short stories in the field. Nor should Hoffman's psychological fantasies be overlooked. If I take Lovecraft to be the most important single writer of the weird, it's because he unites the traditions that preceded him on both sides of the Atlantic and builds on their strengths. His Supernatural Horror in Literature is not only an appreciation of all that he found best in the genre and a critique of the flaws he saw, but also a statement of his own artistic ambitions. His fiction gives them life.

To an extent his reputation is the victim of his most famous creation, the Lovecraft Mythos. It was conceived as an antidote to conventional Victorian occultism - as an attempt to reclaim the imaginative appeal of the unknown - and is only one of many ways his tales suggest worse, or greater, than they show. It is also just one of his means of reaching for a sense of wonder, the aim that produces the visionary horror of his finest work (by no means all of it belonging to the Mythos). His stories represent a search for the perfect form for the weird tale, a process in which he tried out all the forms and all the styles of prose he could.

Nevertheless the Mythos is his most visible bequest to the field, because it looks so easy to imitate or draw upon. As one of the first writers to copy Lovecraft without having known him, I must take some of the blame for the way his concept has been rendered over-explicit and over-explained, precisely the reverse of his intentions. Luckily his influence is far more profound. In his essays and letters he was able to preserve the notion of horror fiction as literature despite all the assaults pulp writing had made on its best qualities, a view that was especially fruitful in the case of Fritz Leiber, who followed his mentor's example of uniting the Transatlantic traditions. Other correspondents such as Robert Bloch, Donald Wandrei and Henry Kuttner assimilated his vision into their own. More recently such diverse talents as T. E. D. Klein, Thomas Ligotti and Poppy Z. Brite have acknowledged Lovecraft's importance to their work, but who could accuse any of them of simple mimicry? His use of suggestion and allusion might seem beyond the reach of most filmmakers, but I submit The Blair Witch Project as the most Lovecraftian of films, not least in the documentary realism he urged upon serious artists in the field and in the inexplicitness with which it conveys, to use his phrase, dread suspense.

Yet Lovecraft's achievement lies not so much in his influence as in the enduring qualities of his finest work. Who can forget the cellars of Joseph Curwen, the alien colour, the grotto beneath Exham Priory, the mountain that walked or stumbled, the graveyard above the tower, the handwriting out of time and so much else? "I must be very deliberate now, and choose my words." He did, and more of his successors should. The field would be all the richer if more writers learned from both his care for structure and his larger principles. His yearning for the cosmic is the greatest strength of his best tales. He is one of the few masters of the tale of terror that reaches for, and often attains, awe.