Cosmic “Usher”: Lovecraft Adapts his “God of Fiction”

Abstract

H. P. Lovecraft’s devotion to Edgar Allan Poe was sometimes so strong that he once called him “my God of Fiction” (Joshi and Shultz, Encyclopedia 207). He may have been right. However, even Lovecraft would later admit that “there may be something rather sophomoric in my intense and unalterable devotion to Poe” (Burleson 214). Poe particularly meant a great deal to him at the beginning of his career while he was shaping his own voice. Indeed, as S. T. Joshi writes, Poe’s influence may be identified as the one thing “that would definitively turn Lovecraft into the man and writer we know” (Joshi, Life 27). Lovecraft himself indicates, “Since Poe affected me most of all horror-writers, I can never feel that a tale starts out right unless it has something of his manner” (153). While readers of Lovecraft have long recognized Poe’s influence, we argue here for a more extensive influence on not only the style of Lovecraft’s tales, but also the nature of theory of fiction underlying them.