H.P. Lovecraft a la Carte

This novella was inspired by a journey to Newburyport, Massachusetts, which in 1931 was much faded from its glory years as a shipbuilding, fishing, and trading center. At the time, Lovecraft was trying to find his way forward as a literary man. The rejections he'd been hit with earlier in the year had convinced him that what he was doing was not going to take him to where he wanted to be - that his efforts to serve two masters had doomed him to rejection by both, and that a repudiation of the pulp market and a thoroughgoing purification and possibly transformation of his literary style was the only solution. Accordingly, he spent November and December of 1931 preparing experimental drafts of this story in different styles. He rejected each in turn; none survives today. Eventually Lovecraft gave up and wrote the story in his regular style.

In later years, this was H.P. Lovecraft's favorite among his own stories, and many of the most serious H.P. Lovecraft fans readily agree that it's his best work. It is one of his most truly, cosmic horror stories, trading not at all on supernatural elements, relying for all its power on the idea of real forces and entities that humans are simply not equipped to fully perceive or understand.

If The Dunwitch Horror engendered any doubts about the trend of Lovecraft's horror fiction into a less-supernatural, more-science-fictionish direction, The Whisperer in Darkness put them definitively to rest. This deeply unsettling narrative blurs the line between and among weird fiction, dark fantasy, and science fiction, and arguably makes better use of its scholarly-but-a-little-thick professorial narrator to evoke sub-textual horror than any previous work. By the time he was writing this story, Lovecraft was acutely aware that he and his primary literary outlet - Weird Tales - were not exactly a match made in Valhalla. They had different literary goals in mind when approaching any given story. Weird Tales liked fairly, conventional shudder-pulp tales, especially ones that delivered a big finish; and Lovecraft had learned by experience that if he let his writing get too subtle and sophisticated, it would be, shot right back to him with an apologetic note from Farnsworth Wright. The Whisperer in Darkness may have been his attempt to bridge these two worlds. It features plenty of pulpy action, to the point of getting, roundly criticized by some Lovecraft fans for borrowing too much from writers like Robert E. Howard. And it does, have that oft-parodied "final crowning horror" line, the last piece of evidence withheld until the very last sentence that reveals The Horrid Truth; but it is voiced by Professor Wilmarth, and for a careful reader (who has, figured out the truth already, long since), it functions not so much, as a crowning horror, but as a line that rings true to a character, who we know really isn't as smart as he thinks he is.

This particularly chilling short story was inspired by a trip that Lovecraft made with Rheinhart Kleiner to the 18th-century Dutch Reformed Church on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn - and to its adjascent graveyard, full of grave markers dating from the mid-1700s. While there, Lovecraft pocketed a piece of one of the grave markers; and it set him to thinking about the possibilities of a story plot in which a vengeful tomb-denizen, resenting a similar act of souvenir-taking, claws its way out of the grave to track down the desecrator. That story idea led him directly to "The Hound."

This is the most famous of the short stories on which H.P. Lovecraft collaborated with fellow Providence writer Clifford Eddy. "THE LOVED DEAD" probably had a bigger impact on Weird Tales magazine than any other story the pulp ever published. Dark, loathsome and compelling, this first-person tale of necrophilic obsession and night-stalking serial murder sparked widespread outrage and resulted in sales of the magazine being temporarily banned in the state of Indiana as well as several other, smaller local jurisdictions.