The Lovecraft Circle

Abstract

The specter of H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) haunts these pages. Joyce Carol Oates acknowledges his “monomaniacal passion out of a gothic tradition” and dubs him “the American writer of the twentieth century most frequently compared with Poe, in the quality of his art (bizarre, brilliant, inspired, and original) … and its thematic preoccupations (the obsessive depiction of psychic disintegration in the face of cosmic horror).” How rare, she continues, “to encounter, in life or literature, a person for whom the mental life, the thinking life, is so suffused with drama as Lovecraft.”¹ In his own appreciation, Stephen King has written, “The best of [Lovecraft’s] stories packed an incredible wallop. They make us feel the size of the universe we hang suspended in, and suggest shadowy forces that could destroy us all if they so much as grunted in their sleep.”² In scarcely two decades of active writing, this native of Providence, Rhode Island, wrought a distinctive combination of science fiction, spectral, and Gothic horror that has profoundly inf luenced subsequent generations of writers, artists, and filmmakers.

Out of the deep night I saw demons stretch their fiery claws towards the carefree mortals dancing on the thin edge of the bottomless pit. I saw clearly in my imagination the conflict between human nature and those unknown, monstrous powers which surround man, plotting to destroy him.

E. T. A. Hoffmann, Notes on Don Giovanni

It was—well, it was mostly a kind of force that doesn’t belong in our part of space; a kind of force that acts and grows and shapes itself by other laws that those of our sort of Nature. We have no business calling in such things from outside, and only very wicked people and very wicked cults ever try to.

H. P. Lovecraft, “The Dunwich Horror”