A Series of Unfortunate Remarks
A few years back, “Lemony Snicket” was asked to review the Modern Library’s Selected Tales of H. P. Lovecraft. The results were blasphemous. After a bad beginning, which argued that one cannot read Lovecraft without a fit of giggles, Snicket careens down the slippery slope of stylistic critique. But it’s a cliché that Lovecraft’s prose is pompous and ponderous, not something that needs to be proved with extensive quotation—four full paragraphs (of fourteen) and many sentences besides. And Lovecraft’s humour is often deliberate.
Nor do we need more derision for Lovecraft’s biologically challenged monstrosities. This has already been expressed, canonically, by the critic Edmund Wilson, whose 1945 New Yorker piece, “Tales of the Marvellous and the Ridiculous” moans that “the only real horror in most of these fictions is the horror of bad taste and bad art.”
I used to be a Lovecraft junkie, and I sometimes still admit the fact. I would not defend my thirteen-year-old taste—let slone Lovecraft’s racism. But a serious response to Lovecraft’s work must begin with the fact that he isn’t really frightening (something for which Wilson cannot forgive him), that he writes awkwardly (in a way), and that his characters are paper thin, and ask: what is Lovecraft trying to do?
It may be too simple to say that Lovecraft does not terrify. But he is not spine-chilling. Nor is it good to defend him, as Snicket does, by appeal to the lonely monomania of his narrators, which “accumulates a creepy minimalism” that is “very, very scary.”
Taken as a whole, Lovecraft’s work exhibits a hopeless isolation not unlike that of Samuel Beckett: lonely man after lonely man, wandering aimlessly through a shadowy city or holing up in rural emptiness, pursuing unspeakable secrets or being pursued by secret unspeakables, all to little avail and to no comfort.
This is the literary-critical equivalent of laughing at, not with. That one is freaked out by Lovecraft’s narrators is not a compliment to him unless they are meant to be the locus of terror, which they are not.
It is even more inept to express disgust at Lovecraft’s creatures (as both Snicket and Wilson are prone to do). We can see this in a passage quoted at length in the review.
They were pinkish things about five feet long; with crustaceous bodies bearing vast pairs of dorsal fins or membraneous wings and several sets of articulated limbs, and with a sort of convoluted ellipsoid, covered with multitudes of very short antennae, where a head would ordinarily be.
Lovecraft’s target here is the opposite of the eerie: it is the medical, or the zoological. The masterpiece of this is the dissection of the Old Ones in At the Mountains of Madness. Lovecraft’s best and most successful trope is to turn the supernatural into science, the violation of law into radical ignorance, gods into aliens.
Apart from its intrinsic charm, and its influence on science fiction, the project of making the magical mundane is akin to the more respectable literary task of evoking the strangeness of the ordinary. Lovecraft offers an inverse of Martian poetry, but the effect of mystery and awe is to some extent the same—not because the aliens are mystical or awesome, but because we are invited to see ourselves as aliens, too.
This is why Mountains culminates in bathos. Not Dyer’s raving confrontation with a “shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles” but the true conclusion of the novel, his acknowledgement of the Old Ones, who have done nothing we would not do in their place:
Radiates, vegetables, monstrosities, star spawn—whatever they had been, they were men!