Book Review

The Colour Out of Space 

by H.P. Lovecraft

     H.P. Loveccraft lived a sheltered life during his childhood. Due to several illnesses, he spent a lot of time at home with his mother who both doted on him and psychologically abused him. As if he wanted to get as psychologically far away as possible, he immersed himself deeply in the study of astronomy. His grandfather had a talent for telling him ghost stories and both his parents ended up dying in asylums for the mentally insane. Though wealthy, they had spent all their money and left very little to H.P. as an inheritance. As a result, the themes of dreams, disease, madness, and invasion permeate his fiction. The Colour Out of Space is a short collection of some of Lovecraft’s best short stories and, more or less, they all touch upon those themes in some way.

     The theme of scholarship plays a central role in most of these stories. Lovecraft himself was an avid reader and student of science. This desire for knowledge gets transported into his stories. Almost all of them are narrated by some scholar or professor acting as both investigator and researcher. The main characters in “The Colour Out of Space”, “The Call of Cthulhu”, “The Whisperer In the Dark”, and “The Shadow Out of Time” are in the process of gathering information for scholastic studies. The knowledge they seek endangers them, however. In “The Colout Out of Space”, he risks his health, sanity, and life to learn about an abstract being that came to Earth in a meteor. The color drains all the life out of a family living on a farm when it starts living in their well. Everything that comes into contact with the water withers, gets sick, goes insane, and dies. The terror in this story is not only rooted in a fear of invasion but also a fear of contamination as well. The invader is a bright glowing light that is made of colors never seen before by people; this contrasts with the grayness of the dying vegetation and the weakening people who rot while they live after it poisons them. You can see the roots of this story in the mind of a sick boy, quarantined at home while watching his parents lose their minds. Some powerful alien force, brilliant and mysterious, seemed to have entered the sanctuary of the secure Lovecraft household and turned everything into a nightmare.

     Keep in mind that the color that invaded from outer space is not only a being that inspires fear but a source of fascination too. Many people have criticized Lovecraft for writing stories that symbolized xenophobia and turned the fear of the Other into allegories. To a great extent that is true but that does not take all the dimensions of his writing into account. Some of Lovecraft’s creatures are monsters that inspire fear but the scholars that narrate his stories always take deep interest in them nonetheless. Learning about them, studying them, and pursuing them puts their lives in danger but they insist on pursuing their research no matter what the consequences may be.

     In “The Call of Cthulhu”, the narrator learns about a voodoo cult in New Orleans that makes sacrifices to a strange monstrous idol. Though obviously scared and contemptuous of these people, he meets with them to ask questions about their beliefs and rituals. After learning about their pantheon of elder gods that live on other planets, including Cthulhu, the main deity of their rites, he connects their practices to the writings in the Necronomicon. He discovers that other people living in remote regions of Earth are also waiting for Cthulhu to reappear; their rituals are meant to curry favor with the monstrous god who makes a brief appearance in the end when his city of R’lyeh rises out of the ocean and he awakens to chase away some sailors. But the story is not actually about Cthulhu; it is about the people who worship him, the people who seek knowledge of him, and the terror he inspires. The scariest thing about Cthulhu and the elder gods is not so much that they look deadly; they are frightening more because of what they represent. They live on other planets, they are older than the human race and they will live long after the human race dies out. Compared to people they are infinitely stronger and more resilient. Worst of all, they care little about what people do; they have no interest in the cultists who worship them or in anybody else. The idea that people are not the masters of the universe is what scares readers most since, compared to the elder gods, we are little more than a specie of flies.

     “The Whisperer In the Dark” is the best and most complex story in this collection. A young scholar hears rumors about crab-like creatures that people see floating in a river in Vermont. He makes contact with an elderly scientist who lives in the region who has been studying these beings and, along with obligatory references to the Necronomicon and the elder gods of the Cthulhu mythos, sends the young man a record he made of the their speaking and a round stone with hieroglyphics carved into it. After sending these objects through the mail, the old man starts getting harassed at night by some local rustics and then the stone disappears and never arrives at the young scholar’s house. He travels to Vermont to find out what happened and upon arrival, discovers that the crab-like monsters are from the distant planet Yuggoth. They have advanced technology that is superior to that of humans and one of their talents is the ability to transplant a human’s consciousness into cylinders so that the physical body is no longer necessary. Aside from the fact that they terrorize the old scientist during the night and speak in a way that sounds like a mixture of buzzing and whispering, they represent another kind of horror: the horror of ambiguity. We never learn what their intentions are. Did they actually come to Earth for malevolent purposes? Is it good or bad that they can transfer a human mind out of its body so it can travel through outer space? Did they kill the old scientists or did he willingly choose to submit to their technologies? The open-ended questions are what make this story unsettling.

     If “The Whisperer In the Dark” is an allegory of xenophobia, as some have charged, it is a strange kind of xenophobia, one that speaks of a fear or distrust of the Other for being superior and difficult to comprehend. And again, the narrator is interested in learning about them despite what dangers that pursuit represents. They do not invade his territory or come after him; he travels from Arkham, Massachusetts to Vermont to learn about them. In a sense, he is almost as much an intruder in their territory as the creatures from Yuggoth are in his. They almost meet halfway on almost neutral ground. This is not a xenophobia of combat and hate; it is actually a mixture of fascination and fear that is more nuanced than many have given Lovecraft credit for.

     The narrator in “The Shadow Out Of Time” takes a more proactive stance. Rather than being an observer and reporter of events like in the previously mentioned stories, he puts himself directly into the line of danger in his pursuit of knowledge. When the story starts, he falls into a coma and after he wakes up begins having dreams. During these nocturnal wanderings he inhabits another body, becoming one of what he calls the Great Race. These creatures live in a highly mechanized society so, having very little physical work to do, they spend most of their lives creating art, reading, and writing books. Their vast library contains the history of everything that ever existed or will exist and the narrator makes his contribution by writing a history of the human race. This book is a slim volume in comparison to everything else that has ever happened, again reminding us that humans are trivial and unimportant in the grand scheme of the universe. He later goes on an archaeological expedition in Australia. While there, he stumbled into the underground ruins of the Great Race’s city only to find that he knows his way around because that is the exact place he had previously visited in his dreams.

     “The Shadow Out of Time” is a good story but its biggest shortcoming is that it is more or less the same as At the Mountains of Madness. The Great Race lives the same kind of life lived by the Shoggoth even though their physical form is different. Their cities are almost identical in description except that the Shoggoth were located on a plateau near the South Pole while the Great Race inhabited Australia. These similarities indicate a deeper flaw in Lovecraft’s writing. His range of ideas did not stretch very far. To be fair, that it is not entirely his fault. He did not start writing weird fiction until his later years in life and soon after he died at a young age of intestinal cancer. (Is that why he wrote about caves with terrible stenches and sadistic monsters?) These stories introduce the creatures of the Cthulhu mythology but he never got around to having them really do much of anything. His vocabulary range did not extend far either; the words eldritch and cyclopean are probably used at least once in every story, sometimes more. But his ideas were so big, unique, and seminal that he has earned himself a permanent place in the canon of nightmarish writing. He actually transcends the genre of horror since his style is midway between Romanticism, Gothic supernaturalism, and Victorian prose on one hand and horror, mystery, noir, and science fiction on the other hand with some elements of Freudian and Jungian psychoanalysis that were current during his lifetime.

     For an initiation into the cult of H.P. Lovecraft, The Colour Out of Space is an ideal place to start. These stories introduce all the major themes he takes up in his other works. There is enough here to pick apart and analyze from multiple dimensions. With even some rudimentary knowledge of his short and troubled life, you can connect the dots between these stories and where the ideas came from. Lovecraft’s life and literature were a window into another bizarre but parallel world where reality gets morphed into all kinds of strange shapes and fed back to us in ways that twist our thoughts. It is too bad he did not live longer so we could see where this writing would lead us later on.

Lovecraft, H.P. The Colour Out of Space. Lancer Books, New York: 1969. 

Book Review

At the Mountains of Madness and Other Tales of Terror

by H.P. Lovecraft

     H.P. Lovecraft was a unique author writing at a unique time. At the Mountains of Madness was written as a key story in the Cthulhu Mythos since it gives a detailed history of the Shoggoth. It is unique, also, for being a story about Antarctic exploration, a subject that had captured the interests of Lovecraft in his day. While being on of Lovecraft’s longest works, At the Mountains of Madness is good but certainly not his best.

     H.P. Lovecraft was a scholar of science and this shows in this novelette. The story begins with two ships of archaeologists and geologists sailing from Massachusetts to the South Pole. The detailed description of their voyage is vivid, sometimes bleak and forbidding and at other times fantastic and full of wonder. It is a description of the sublime in nature almost worthy of the Romantic poets but then again, it is probably also somewhat ordinary when compared to other writings about the southernmost regions.

     When the ships reach firm land, two groups of explorers set out. One team, led by a scientist named Lake, discovers a gloomy mountain range with caves and cubical structures lining the peaks. The harsh wind blowing through the caves make eerie, flute-like music that permeates the surrounding landscape. In the foothills, they discover an underground cavern with several dead creatures comprised of barrel-shaped bodies and having heads like starfish. The creatures get transported back to camp to be studied, then Lake’s communications abruptly stop.

Every mystery story needs a hook and this is where that element comes into play. The narrator and a pilot go out to the camp, only to find that it has been destroyed, all the men and dogs at the camp were mutilated, and the creatures were taken away. One man named Gedney and one dog can not be located, so the team of two fly out to the mountains to search for them. On the other side of the range they find a strange, abandoned city, partially covered in glacial ice. They begin to explore in search of the missing man and find roomfulls of statues that tell the history of the Shoggoth, one of the many races of pre-human creatures that populate the world of Lovecraft’s invented mythology. The bodies discovered by Lake were those of some dead Shoggoth.

     The narrative alternates between dry, sometimes scientific description and story telling. Some readers of Lovecraft complain about this but it actually works well as a writing technique. The descriptiveness is long and can be boring to the point of insanity but when the action starts it takes off like a rocket. Without revealing too much, it can be said that the narrator and his partner find a tower with a spiral ramp at its base that leads them down into an underground abyss.

     One thing that can be said about At the Mountains of Madness is that it is a story of inversions. The Shoggoth appear to be an inverted form of humanity; their physical form and habitats are different but their social and psychological forms are very much human. The mountains represent a threshold that, when passed in an airplane, takes the explorers almost literally into another world that subverts everything that scientists know about civilization and the human race. The mountains also work as a motif of inversion since, ordinarily thought of as solid, geological protuberances, these are hollow and full of tunnels where most of the significant events of the story take place. This structural theme is more apparent in the contrast between what exists above ground and what takes place in the caves and under the surface of the glacier. During their explorations of the city, the narrator learns why the Shoggoth died out as a race, preparing him for the event that happens at the end. This tory depicts a world turned inside out, one where the sun never sets and the most populous creatures are giant albino penguins. It is a world that should never have been revealed to people.

     At the Mountains of Madness is at times slow; if Lovecraft used this dragging, redundant technique to make the more exciting parts rush by a little more rapidly, he overplayed that stylistic device but only slightly. Another criticism of this novelette is that the narrator and other characters are two-dimensional; they only exist for the purpose of telling the story and, since it is a horror narrative, there needs to be someone to be scared. They could be any arbitary people though since they are devoid of any feelings other than interest and fear. Then again, Lovecraft was a pulp writer and one with a deep interest in science which is less about the scientists and more about the knowledge they obtain; he was never really known for drawing complex or well-rounded characters.

     What the story does get right is the sense of anxiety. It has the ordinary amount of tension one might feel when wanting to learn the solution to a mystery and the intrigue involved in the pursuit of forbidden knowledge, even with the idea in mind that the price of learning it might be insanity or death. The sense of fear is appropriately felt when the explorers go down into the abyss under the tower, not knowing when or if it will end; the feeling of being sunk into a void of never-ending blackness is profound and one that speaks outside of routine genre literature-type horror. Combined with the acquired knowledge of the Shoggoth, a race that came into existence and went extinct without people even knowing about it, makes us think that maybe we are little more than just another biological species that will someday die out and be forgotten; beyond us there may be nothing but a void, a vacuum of nothingness that has no purpose and no meaning. Lovecraft’s monsters may be symbols of anxiety but they signify a human anxiety that runs deeper than a threat to our physical safety or mental stability; they exemplify our fear that we are nothing.

     While it certainly has its flaws, this story is a key piece in the cycle of the Cthulhu Mythos. This is largely because it gives such a complete description of the Shoggoth. When compared to other stories in Lovecraft’s oeuvre, it illuminates dark corners that might not have been revealed otherwise. It is slow at times but fun to read at the end as well. Being one of his only novelettes, you may wonder if he could have gone on to be a good novelist had he lived longer. 

Lovecraft, H.P. At the Mountains of Madness and Other Tales of Terror. Beagle Books Inc., New York: 1971.

Book Review

The Tomb and Other Tales by H.P. Lovecraft

     H.P. Lovecraft has always evoked a wide range of responses from his readers. That may be less apparent with The Tomb and Other Tales, a collection of minor stories, odds and ends, and obscurities put together by Lovecraft’s literary executor August Derleth. Having said that, fans who read this might still feel a range of conflicting emotions.

     This short paperback anthology is comprised of three sections. The first is a collection of completed short stories that were published in pulp magazines. Most are typical, maybe even generic, Lovecraft tales. Many of them are actually algorithmically the same story written with different details. Stories like “The Tomb”, “He”, and “The Strange High House In the Mist” all involve an nondescript narrator who goes in search of some form of ancient and forbidden knowledge, ends up in a place with some creepy people who perform some ceremonial magic, and reveal to him hallucinatory terrors of another, parallel world full of weird creatures with bad intentions. “Imprisoned With the Pharaohs” also follows this template but has the unique distinction of having been ghostwritten for Harry Houdini, one of the few readers who had an admiration for Lovecraft during his lifetime. It also exemplifies the Egyptomania and Art Nouveau styles of its day. It is, however, mediocre writing, even when considering pulp standards.

     The best piece in the first section, “The Horror of Red Hook”, is, unfortunately, also the most racist. A policeman is sent to investigate some strange happenings in a sordid section of New York City. He encounters a scholar of the occult named Robert Suydam who appears to be the leader of a cult. Using some unflattering and xenophobic descriptions, it is explained that the cult is made up of Kurdish Yezidis involved in human trafficking, bootlegging, and child sacrifice. Like most of the stories in this collection, the investigation leads to underground tunnels and the horrific sites of otherworldly creatures entering our dimension. Lovecraft describes the Kurdish immigrants in distinctly negative terms; by doing so he meant to shock and horrify his audience, which was miniscule during his lifetime by the way, but those racist details, as offensive as they are, make stories like this look more dated than scary. Unpacking the racism in Lovecraft’s writing can lead you down a rabbit hole that is more nuanced and complex than one may care to admit at first.

     “The Walls of Eryx” is another one of the better stories. An astronaut explorer bushwhacks through the jungles of Venus in search of crystals that work as potent sources of energy on Earth. The crystals are worshiped by big lizard men who succeed in trapping him inside an invisible labyrinth made of a glassy, unbreakable material unknown to the people of Earth. Critics of Lovecraft may point out that Venus resembles a tropical colony that gets invaded by white people who come to take resources from the non-white inhabitants represented by the lizard men. The story has a twist though since the astronaut can not escape from the trap, and while admitting defeat, confesses that the lizard men may be of equal intelligence to people from Earth after all. He realizes that they ultimately have no right to come and steal the crystals from Venus and should, in the future, try to learn from the lizard men rather than conquering them. H.P. Lovecraft was undoubtedly racist but at least this story shows that he may have been open to alternate ways of thinking about other kinds of people if he had lived longer.

     The second section of this paperback has some of his earliest writings. They are all works of juvenilia and read exactly like what they are: the kind of stories you might find in a high school creative writing class. They are full of the types of shortcomings you would expect. They do, however, show how Lovecraft was rooted in the ideals of romanticism and neo-paganism. Therefore, they may be of interest to those who want to understand what literary strands led up to his better and more developed works.

     Surprisingly, the most interesting stories appear in the third section which contains four fragments of stories Lovecraft started and never completed. “Azathoth” is a fast-paced swirling psychedelic phantasmagoria that means little but hits you like an acid rock song from the 1960s. “The Descendant” is about a man who went crazy from studying The Necronomicon and putting its theories into practice. “The Book” continues on with a similar theme.

     H.P. Lovecraft is more or less a cult writer. The politically correct abhor him but shouldn’t they? He intended to horrify and scare his audience so at least at that level he succeeded. Snooty literary snobs condemn him for his overly long sentences, tortured grammar, and unnecessarily descriptive paragraphs about things that do not need to be described. But he did express a coherent vision of the interactions between parallel universes that is imaginative and fun to read at times. A lot of writers do that though; what makes Lovecraft unique is that he opens a window into a literary world that can be analyzed endlessly as one doorway into the tunnels of his mind lead to more and mor doorways in endless succession. It goes even deeper when you try to square Lovecraft the man with the things he wrote, only to find an odd assortment of contradictions, curiosities, and coincidences. His ideas fit snugly with psychoanalysis and read like a plunge into the human id. The theme of a dark, evil, terrifying, and violent reality that underlies our ordinary lives anticipates the works of David Lynch who took on a similar framework sixty years later. The Tomb and Other Tales will probably only appeal to diehard and fanatical fans but for those people it can provide an extra touch of insight into this notoriously fascinating author.

Lovecraft, H.P. The Tomb and Other Tales. Ballantine Books Inc., New York: 1974.

Mystery Attracts Mystery: The Forgotten Partnership of H. P. Lovecraft and Harry Houdini

Pulp is one of the great unheralded archives of American cultural history. Ephemeral by its very nature, the pulp magazine or paperback brought millions of readers the derring-do of detectives and superheroes, the misadventures of doomed lovers, and the horrors of gruesome monsters. They were the birthplaces of Tarzan and Zorro, and published the work of such luminaries as Agatha Christie, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Mark Twain, and Tennessee Williams.

Read the full article on Journal Of the History of Ideas Blog here