Poe’s stories focus on realistic fears all humans have. HP Lovecraft said ‘Poe…worked with an analytical knowledge of terror’s true sources which doubled the force of his narratives’[1]. This is shown in the previous two stories. We are all vulnerable to disease, and the older we get the more some of us will worry about losing our sanity due to our advancing age. Poe’s frequent use of the uncanny in his literature helps to exaggerate these fears and elevate their reality within the mind of the reader. Poe largely neglects his characters; instead he ‘excels in incidents and broad narrative effects,’[2] this is the strength of his work. The reader can easily place themselves in the story in the narrators place. This allows them to almost experience the fears first hand. Poe’s stories have infiltrated pop culture, the television show The Simpsons[3] adapted his poem The Raven as part of a Halloween special, and they have also referenced his other works in various episodes. A film is to be released this year entitled The Raven[4] but featuring Poe himself as a character forced to help the police when a serial killer starts copying his work. Poe’s techniques have made his literature timeless. The grounded fears he uses to inspire terror are however, in contrast to a big admirer of Poe’s work; HP Lovecraft
Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937) is a divisive figure in the literary world. The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction[5] omits all mention of an American writer who shaped the world of gothic and horror as we know it today. In stark contrast to this, Stephen King claims that Lovecraft ‘Opened the way for me, as he had done for others before me.’[6]
Lovecraft’s fiction is most widely known for his Cthulhu mythos. The mythos is a collection of stories concerning monsters of unimaginable size, described by some scholars (but never Lovecraft himself) as ‘Elder Gods’. The mere sight of these creatures is enough to drive anyone who beholds them to madness. However this mythology is a product of the media, one that S.T. Joshi and David E. Schultz describe as an ‘anti-mythology’ in the H.P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia. They go on to state that
the careful readers of his mythology will realise that it is no mythology at all, but a cycle of events intended to be perceived by only the more primitive or impressionable characters as real in the context of fiction[7]
Lovecraft’s fiction consisted mostly of short stories published in pulp magazines. These stories explore the human condition, with five key themes central to his work: madness, isolation, unfathomable horror, human insignificance, and the question of whether we can fully accept the story being told to us by a narrator who has first-hand experience of one or more of the previous four themes. Through an exploration of two of his most famous works, it will become apparent how Lovecraft effectively creates fear.
Madness rears its ugly head throughout the works of Lovecraft. The unfortunate narrator of each of his tales usually has experienced an inexplicable horror that has stolen away his sanity, leaving him to pen a cautionary tale warning the reader not to follow in his footsteps. The first-hand recollection that we are given as a reader makes the story more personal. Instead of hearing a narrative from a third person perspective where the audience is distanced from the action, the first person style makes it appear as though the protagonist is writing a letter directly to the reader. This direct address immediately forges a connection between reader and protagonist. The first person narrative used by Lovecraft gives his protagonist a direct passage to the reader, forcing them to empathise with the protagonist as they are seeing the narrative from his perspective.
The question of just how much of what we read can be believed recurs frequently with Lovecraft. His tales are so extravagant, to the point that his narrators have gone insane. This raises some doubt as to whether the protagonists have experienced these events first hand, or whether the stories are merely a product of their madness. In Dagon[8] potential seeds of doubt about the legitimacy of our protagonist are placed immediately, with him writing ‘I am writing this under appreciable mental strain, since by tonight I shall be no more’ (p. 1). It is quickly revealed to the reader that our unfortunate narrator has been on medication to help him cope with the horror he is about to reveal to us, and he has exhausted his supply. This instantly tells the reader that we are not dealing with someone in a healthy mental condition, subtly raising doubt about what we are about to be told, a technique also used by Lovecraft in The Music of Erich Zann[9] . Lovecraft then proceeds to tell the story of what happened from the viewpoint of the narrator. This structure is extremely common in Lovecraft; an introduction from our narrator hinting at what is to come, the story itself, and finally it is revealed how these events have negatively impacted the protagonists’ life.
Dagon follows the aforementioned structure. Once the story has been told, the writing style continues to be a stream of consciousness, with the writer hearing the sounds he heard on his terrible journey across the ocean, and ending on ‘The end is near. I hear a noise at the door, as of some immense slippery body lumbering against it. It shall not find me. God, that hand! The window! The window!’ (p. 6) This chilling conclusion is extremely effective. We can assume the reader is horrified by the fact that the creature our narrator saw out in the middle of the ocean has made it to Lovecraft’s fictional American town of Arkham, however as this is the last sentence of the story, we are never quite sure what happens to our narrator. The narrator has experienced Burke’s sublime[10], he is unable to complete the story due to the fear he is experiencing. It is implied that he is to be killed in some terrible way by Dagon, but it is possible he managed to throw himself out of his window as planned. There is also the third possibility that his insanity got the better of him and he was unable to write anymore. However as he has stopped writing, rendered helpless by his emotions, drawing on Burke’s theory of the sublime, we will never know.
However, on further reflection, given what we have been told, and the fact that although based within a fictional town, the story takes place in contemporary America, doubts are raised about the authenticity of our narrators story. The withdrawal from heavy use of valium, coupled with the narrators’ previous allusions to having visions of the creature, presents the theory that he has imagined the creature at his door. His screams of ‘The window!’ could either mean that the creature has appeared at his window, or that he is trying to reach the window in order to plummet to his death. Whilst the creature is described as being ‘gigantic’ (p. 5) if he can see the creature at the window, the likelihood of him not noticing the creature until it was so close is slim. This enigmatic ending however only adds to the strength of the story.
Another point of note is that of course, if Dagon had appeared before him, our narrator would probably stop writing immediately. Rather than using this as an argument for his narrator’s insanity, I feel this is simply a literary method used to give his stories a powerful conclusion. As has been said of Lovecraft, he ‘would open the door…but only a crack,’[11] and this is a perfect example. The tale of Dagon raises more questions than it answers, leaving a terrifying image in the readers mind.
Isolation is also a prevalent theme within all of Lovecraft’s writings. Using this to create fear is a popular feature of horror since it began, dating to well before Lovecraft was writing, such as in Matthew Lewis’ The Monk (1796)[12], where Ambrosio is left alone for six days until he dies at the conclusion of the novel. The use of this technique continues to this day. This taps into the human fear of being alone, something that affects us all on a base level. When isolated we are left helpless, with no one to help us should we fall ill or encounter danger. In Dagon our narrator finds himself isolated, and this could contribute to the narrators’ possible madness. At the beginning of the story, our narrator finds himself stranded out at sea, and after several days he ‘began to despair in my solitude upon the heaving vastness of unbroken blue.’ (p. 1) The narrator is made to feel insignificant by the expanse of the sea around him, relating to another theme of Lovecraft’s that is prominent in The Call of The Cthulhu. In The Call of The Cthulhu[13], Lovecraft writes, ‘We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.’ (p. 139) and this works as a metaphor for the narrator in Dagon. He has travelled the oceans further than he has meant to, and found himself adrift and despairing at his situation.
The horror that features in Lovecraft’s stories focus on horrors that are unfathomable to the human mind. Lovecraft consciously avoids too much description of what his characters witness, often stating that the narrator is unable to describe what he has seen or heard. This applies even when his stories are relatively grounded in reality. Lovecraft’s visions were ahead of their time. Today we have Godzilla (1954)[14] and the recently released Cloverfield (2008)[15] depicting giant monsters, yet even these pieces of cinema don’t come close to capturing the scale of horror Lovecraft tells of.
[1] H.P. Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror In Literature. [Ebook] Amazon Media, Available at: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Supernatural-Horror-in-Literature-ebook/dp/B005IZD612/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1334933516&sr=1-3 [20/04/2012], p. 20
[2] H.P. Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror In Literature. [Ebook] Amazon Media, Available at: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Supernatural-Horror-in-Literature-ebook/dp/B005IZD612/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1334933516&sr=1-3 [20/04/2012], p. 23
[3] The Simpsons (1990) Season 2, Episode 3, Treehouse of Horror. TV. FOX. 25th October.
[4] The Raven (2012) Film. Directed by JAMES MCTEIGUE, USA: Intrepid Pictures
[5] Jerrold E. Hogle (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002)
[6] H.P. Lovecraft, Necronomicon, The Best Weird Tales of H.P. Lovecraft (London: Gollancz, 2008), sleeve.
[7] S.T. Joshi and David E. Schultz, An H.P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2001), p. 51
[8] H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of The Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories(London: Penguin Classics, 2002), p. 1-6
[9] H.P. Lovecraft, Necronomicon, The Best Weird Tales of H.P. Lovecraft (London: Gollancz, 2008), p. 58-64
[10] Edmund Burke (1757), Of The Sublime. [WWW] Bartleby. Available from: http://www.bartleby.com/24/2/107.html [27/4/2012]
[11] Stephen King, Danse Macabre (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1991), p. 135
[12] Matthew Lewis, The Monk (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998)
[13] H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of The Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories(London: Penguin Classics, 2002), p. 139-69
[14] Godzilla (1954) Film. Directed by Ishirô Honda, Japan: Toho Film Co. Ltd.
[15] Cloverfield (2008) Film. Directed by MATT REEVES, USA: Paramount Pictures
The Babysitter Murders 