COMPLETE GUIDE
HP LOVECRAFT
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said about Poe’s infl uence at face value
without really showing how. In fact, other than
the occasional homage, he created stories that
do not bear the faintest resemblance to Poe.
Arthur Machen’s themes are somewhat more
present but the sense of cosmic horror really
takes us into the depths in Lovecraft in a way
Machen doesn’t (though he comes close in his
terrifying The Great God Pan).
“I think, especially given the long time it
took Lovecraft’s reputation to germinate, it
makes much more sense to think about how
his work created a dark world that modern
horror and tales of the fantastic would make
their workshop.”
The quality of Lovecraft’s writing, dense
with archaisms and sometimes overwrought
descriptions, has often been called into
question. Poole takes an even-handed
view. “Neil Gaiman is right when he says,
paraphrasing, that no one comes close
to some of Lovecraft’s best passages and
phrases. By the same token, when he wrote
badly, few important writers are worse.
Uneven doesn’t even begin to describe his
oeuvre. He simply could not write dialogue
and, with one or two exceptions, failed
to create characters with any meaningful
complexity. But what keeps him from being
simply a minor fi gure are his strengths in
world-building, the breadth of his imaginative
capacity. He did not set out to make a
mythology. But he laid the groundwork for a
multitude of dark imaginings and should be
thought of alongside fi gures like Franz Kafka
in his willingness to explore his ideas to the
point of utter cosmic nihilism.” For LaValle, Lovecraft’s real skill lies in the
sheer bleak atmosphere of his writing. “His
truly spectacular stuff isn’t a large part of his
output but it’s distinctive: ‘The Colour Out Of
Space’, The Shadow Over Innsmouth, ‘Dagon’,
‘The Dunwich Horror’. Each of these strikes me
as masterpieces of mood, which really was his
strong point as a writer.”
Poole lists some other outstanding works:“There’s a sense in which his most infl uential
work may not be his most important. The
‘Call Of Cthulhu’ is the tale most fans point
to and it’s certainly one of three or four of his
best stories. In terms of sheer creative power,
however, his novella At The Mountains Of
Madness and the story ‘The Shadow Over
Innsmouth’ may be the best crafted and most
frightening work he ever did. The latter is a
personal favourite, as is what’s sometimes
called his prose-poem Nyarlathotep and a
story that I think will age very well, the odd
and startling ‘Hypno’s.”
The genre classics that draw upon the deep
well of imagery provided by Lovecraft are too
abundant to list, though Poole highlights a few
outstanding examples: “We see echoes of his
work everywhere in horror, fi lms like Ridley
Scott’s classic Alien series that imagines the
Alien as neither a force that wishes to invade
us nor to befriend us. We are simply in the
way, perhaps at best its food. It’s no surprise
then that the not-entirely-successful attempt by
Scott to give a background mythology to Alien
in Prometheus drew heavily on Lovecraftian
themes. In fact, it’s usually cited as one of
the reasons Del Toro’s At The Mountains Of
Madness was never made: the themes are“IT’S BRACING. NO
MORE PRETENDING
THAT IT’S GOING
TO BE ALRIGHT”
VICTOR LAVALLEThis remains the
best Lovecraft fi lm.