Lovecraft matures.

As Lovecraft continues writing short stories, he also noticeably becomes a more solid writer. He now has a more comprehensive vision of a parallel universe filled with horror, the Cthulhu Mythos that made him famous. In this respect, Lovecraft is also a more modern writer. He goes a step beyond Poe himself and becomes what we could call the J.R.R. Tolkien of the horror genre (i.e., a writer who doesn't only write stories but who manages to create a whole universe, a separate world, a parallel reality with its own set of rules and traditions). Among the stories included in this volume, one can clearly perceive a gradual evolution towards a more settled down, more solid narrative in The Colour Out of Space (1927) and The Whisperer in Darkness (1930) but it's with The Shadow Over Innsmouth (1931) that we can already tell the author reached a new plateau. The nearly 15 pages where the main character explains how he managed to escape from the strange creatures in Innsmouth is a masterpiece of the genre for, in spite of the length of the description, Lovecraft never lets us go. The story becomes a page turning frenzy at that point. The end of the story is no less of an achievement, although obviously set at a completely different pace when the narrator realizes that he is quickly becoming one of the beasts he despised so much.

My great-grandmother had been a Marsh of unknown source whose husband lived in Arkham —and did not Zadok say that the daughter of Obed Marsh by a monstrous mother was married to an Arkham man through a trick? What was it the ancient toper had muttered about the likeness of my eyes to Captain Obed's? In Arkham, too, the curator had told me I had the true Marsh eyes. Was Obed Marsh my own great-great-grandfather? Who —or what— then, was my great-great-grandmother? But perhaps this was all madness.

(...)

For more than two years I fought off these reflections with partial success. My father secured me a place in an insurance office, and I buried myself in routine as deeply as possible. In the winter of 1930-31, however, the dreams began. (...) Some frightful influence, I felt, was seeking gradually to drag me out of the sane world of wholesome life into unnamable abysses of blackness and alienage; and the process told heavily on me. (...) It was then that I began to study the mirror with mounting alarm. (...) What was taking place in me? Could it be that I was coming to resemble my grandmother and uncle Douglas?

(Lovecraft: pp. 333-334)

The story ends with a true cliff-hanger. It's not, nevertheless, the sort of cheap cliff-hanger one sees in today's movies though. Lovecraft leaves the story wide open, clearly suggesting that the horrible creatures associated to the dark events in Innsmouth (i.e., the creatures he is quickly joining) may rise some day and destroy our world:

The Deep Ones could never be destroyed, even though the palaeogean magic of the forgotten Old Ones might sometimes check them. For the present they would rest; but some day, if they remembered, they would rise again for the tribute Great Cthulhu craved. It would be a city greater than Innsmouth next time.

(Lovecraft: p. 334)

Metaphysical pessimism and the role of science.

No writer can avoid being the son of his times, and Lovecraft is certainly no exception to this. He writes during the first third of the twentieth century and clearly belongs to the generation that has seen the horrors of World War I and was affected by the serious changes brought about by the turn of the century. Born at the end of the nineteenth century, he must clearly have seen the end of the old society and the consolidation of an industrial era that caused some major convulsions at all levels. This end of the old certainties without being replaced by any solid new set of truths, this rapid succession of changes, triggered all sorts of social movements, revolutions and wars that made some people feel afraid of anything related to Modernity. While science may have seemed full of promises to the people who lived during the Enlightenment as well as their heirs in the nineteenth century, by the 1890s or so there were other intellectual currents such as vitalism or the different variations of occultism that managed to spread a very deep skepticism about the possibility of human knowledge. Most of Lovecraft's pieces express this belief.

Life is a hideous thing, and from the background behind what we know of it peer daemoniacal hints of truth which make it sometimes a thousandfold more hideous. Science, already oppresive with its shocking revelations, will perhaps be the ultimate exterminator of our human species -if separate species we be- for its reserve of unguessed horrors could never be borne by mortal brains if loosed upon the world. If we knew what we are, we should do as Sir Arthur Jermyn did; and Arthur Jermyn soaked himself in oil and set fire to his clothing one night. No one placed the charred fragments in an urn or set a memorial to him who had been; for certain papers and a certain boxed objetc were found, which made men wish to forget. Some who knew him do not admit that he ever existed.

(Lovecraft: p. 15)

Far from the serious thirst of knowledge that characterized previous generations (something that was usually illustrated with the mythical figure of Prometheus stealing the light from the gods), we have now a far more pessimistic approach to human nature that is more attuned with our own times, perhaps. Could that be the reason why Lovecraft feels like a contemporary writer? To some extent, Lovecraft can be viewed as some sort of postmodern writer, not only due to his themes but also to the fact that he never quite bothered to undertake what is generally considered the greatest ambition of any writer: a novel. Quite to the contrary, he always seemed to prefer the fragment, the short story.

Read "Dagon" to the kids.

I read Dagon to my kids last night. I know they like horror stories, so I thought it would be a good idea to test with one of H.P. Lovecraft's stories. Kids are used (or we have the prejudice that they are used) to a different type of horror stories, the ones based on witches and ghosts. Exposing them to something completely different was sort of interesting. For starters, they found some of the language quite difficult to grasp but everything was more understandable than I thought. They asked me to clarify a few points here and there, but overall they seemed to follow the story no problem. At certain moments, they kept their eyes wide open. I wouldn't say they reflected terror but, at the very least, they were intrigued and worried about the character's fate. So, all in all, it went much better than I had anticipated. As a matter of fact, at the very end my oldest son (he's 12) commented that he had especially liked the fact that it wasn't your typical horror story, based on witches and ghosts, but rather different and original. Perhaps they are adquiring a literary taste after all!

The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories.

Credited with inventing the modern horror tradition, H.P. Lovecraft almost single-handedly remade the genre in the early twentieth century. More than horror, his literature can be defined as weird, creating what came to be known as cosmic horror: the idea that life is incomprehensible and that the universe we live in is alien to us, in spite of all our efforts to understand it and control it. Lovecraft did away with a tradition of ghosts and witches, replacing them with fragile human characters at the mercy of chaotic and violent universal forces.

The stories included in this volume are extracted from several of Lovecraft's books: The Dunwich Horror and Others, At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels, Dagon and Other Macabre Tales, and Miscellaneous Writings.

Technical description:
Title: The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories.
Author: H.P. Lovecraft.
Publisher: Penguin Books.
Edition: London (UK), 1999.
Pages: 420, including introduction and explanatory notes.
ISBN: 0-14-118706-9