The average book lover inevitably associates mystical literature with two personalities: Edgar Allan Poe and Stephen King. But between these two personalities in the stratum of time there is an equally outstanding creator, who in his work borrowed something from the first and became a source of inspiration for the second, but his name is remembered with much less reverence. His name is Howard Lovecraft.
The key creation of the writer without any hesitation can be called the mystical collection The Call of Cthulhu. It consists of eighteen stories of varying volume: from a couple of pages to full-length short stories. By and large, this collection consists of the classic Lovecraftian short stories, which, in many ways, represent his entire literary experience. The lead story, of course, is the story of the same name, “The Call of Cthulhu,” the title of which appears on the cover of the book.
Stephen King called Lovecraft the dark prince of twentieth-century horror stories. Sounds like a very apt saying to me! But I’d like to focus on the detail – the modern master of horror called his inspiration a prince, not a king at all. And if you look at Lovecraft’s work as a whole, there is an explanation for this: some of his stories are tiresomely predictable and obvious, and the reader is often very likely to predict the subsequent events of the story, but even so, he reads to the end. In any case, Lovecraft is read, and often with gusto! Perhaps that is his special literary formula: as an atheist, he tried to compose horror stories that had nothing to do with religion, so his “monsters” and “beasts” come from ancient times, from the depths of time and space, when humanity didn’t even exist yet.
What was Lovecraft writing about?
In spite of all the abundance written, most of Lovecraft’s stories can be clearly structured according to the following pattern:
Someone discovers something strange;
A terrible thing happens to someone;
Someone tries to find out more about what happened;
This someone learns more and begins to regret it;
That someone goes crazy or dies. And sometimes both.
This scenario is indeed repeated in many of his stories. And for the greater effect of horror and mystery, something bad must happen to an innocent or defenseless person. In those stories where the acting character is purposely searching for something Evil and Ancient, or trying to uncover the secrets of the supernatural, it is by default hard to evoke a stronger sense of empathy for them. And if these horrors happen to people for no apparent reason, such a story is almost certain to produce a much deeper shock. This is a truth Lovecraft learned “perfectly well”!
How did Lovecraft write?
Lovecraft’s major period of creativity fell in the 1920s and 1930s. Of course a lot of time has passed since then, and the language has had time to undergo radical changes, and we are not talking specifically about English or any other, but about language as a universal tool of utterance! But with Lovecraft, one gets the feeling that he deliberately extracts old sayings and turns, thereby demonstrating his vocabulary, while it is quite difficult to know whether these sayings are superfluous or still appropriate. Nevertheless, this peculiar thesaurus of the writer forms his unique style, incomparable to anyone else and at the same time different from the rest.
In other words, Lovecraft’s language may be as boring as the content of his stories, but for some, this form may well prove to be a true source of aesthetic pleasure!
Unfortunately for Lovecraft himself, trouble and misfortune were observed not only in his writing but also in his life. He lived too short a life to have time to enjoy the world, though he hardly had time to enjoy it! Having lived in poverty and terrible illness, Howard Lovecraft never felt literary recognition in his lifetime, but he left a rich legacy to posterity, which served as inspiration for numerous creations of the genre.