Book Review: Tales of H.P. Lovecraft

I first heard of H.P. Lovecraft in the winter of my freshman year of high school, when I listened to Metallica’s Ride the Lightning nonstop. The closing track, an instrumental, was titled “Call of Cthulhu”, and I found out it was a literary reference to a creepshow universe of alien gods and people going insane. Around this time, too, I read an interview in Guitar World with Morbid Angel’s Trey Azagthoth, whose adopted surname is taken from one of Lovecraft’s deities.

I’m sure I came across more Lovecraftian references down the road, but since this was the age of libraries and encyclopedias (those are things like Google but more tactile and heavy), I couldn’t find information fast enough for my hormone-addled teenage brain. Fast forward to now, where you are reading this review of a compilation of the more popular Lovecraft stories — called Tales of H.P. Lovecraft — that formed the basis for his Cthulhu mythos, a universe he shared with his writers group, who included August Derleth and Clark Ashton Smith.

Lovecraft’s style is similar to Poe’s, something that Joyce Carol Oates noted in the introduction. Since I reviewed Poe very recently I picked up on it quickly (I didn’t read Oates’ introduction until after). Lovecraft is meticulous and formal in his narrative, using trends of language that were almost obsolete in his time. There is even a reference to (or a continuation of?) Poe’s “Arthur Gordon Pym” story in “At the Mountains of Madness,” where Pym’s account is cut rather short after the appearance of the white, oversized shrouded figure in the Antarctic mists. You’d be hard pressed to find the same amount of detail in modern storytelling, but Lovecraft effectively delivers suspense and dread through it.

The stories of the mythos are formulaic, also another strike against modern literary sensibilities. The stories are told in the first person and involve the narrator investigating strange incidents with reluctant curiosity and documenting the happenings with warnings for those who read them “not to go any further”. Contact with Lovecraftian gods (who are really just transcendent extraterrestrials) or their creations and subcreatures nudge the human psyche into insanity but never pushes them into it wholesale. It’s Lovecraft’s fine touch and even hand that makes the stories so compelling. Though we end up knowing more about what they have done on earth and in the cosmos, the gods are more “hideous” because we never “see” them completely. Their inappearance augments their horror.

I never knew how much Lovecraft had inspired the horror writers of today until I read up on him. He, like Poe, became renown only posthumously. It would be interesting to delve into other writers’ takes on the mythos cycle but Tales offers a great introduction.