#666: Supernatural Horror in Literature
Or, how Lovecraft’s seminal study of weird fiction made me want to wax philosophical about my favorite genre
Initial release: August 1927 (original run)
Revised version: 1933–1935 (incomplete until posthumously published in full in “The Outsider and Others” in 1939)
Author: Howard Philips Lovecraft
As people file into the cinema to watch the latest Robert Eggers movie, as they turn on their PlayStations to play the latest Bloober Team game (or, more likely, load up YouTube to watch someone else play), as library-goers pick up the latest Joe Hill, Laird Barron or Alison Rumfitt, it can be easy to forget that horror is old. Humans were jumping at shadows back in the year dot; all the sinister pantheons and spirits and other weird creatures of yester-epoch were born from the very human desire to explain things we don’t understand. Horror, terror, the fear of the unknown, all these terms we use to describe the natural human reaction to that which we do not know; we have been molded by it, we grow up with that fear. Even our own fear of dying is because we just don’t know what’s on the other side. It is as much a part of the human condition as the warmth of the sun on our skin. Like the stone-carved memento mori hanging above the sepulchre entrance, horror fiction is a reminder of our own mortality, the limitations of our knowledge, and the darkness at the edge of town.
I couldn’t think of a decent segue so I’m just gonna get down to brass tacks: this is only sort of a review of Supernatural Horror in Literature, Howard Philips Lovecraft’s landmark survey of the state of horror literature as of the mid-1920s. Or perhaps it’s better to say that it’s not really about that essay at all — though my reading it is certainly the seed of this article you’re reading. No, what this is really about is what horror means to me, June Gloom, your favorite catgirl media critic.
After all, this is review #666. Gotta do something to mark the occasion.
I grew up in a religious household. My dad was a lapsed Catholic who would watch The X-Files in the basement against my mother’s orders; my mother, meanwhile, was a paranoid evangelical who struggled to square her deeply reactionary beliefs (which, if I’m being real, were frequently unorthodox to even mainstream evangelicalism) with her natural deep wells of empathy and love for her fellow humans, especially those she saw as having been thrown away by people who were supposed to be their protectors. My first exposure to horror was probably the Indiana Jones movies; I was far too young for those films and never actually saw the third until my teens. (I know, they aren’t really horror, but they certainly have horror elements — Temple of Doom is just a spiritual sequel to The Stranglers of Bombay, and I know I don’t have to remind you of how Raiders of the Lost Ark ended!)
Like most kids, I came into contact with the ideas of ghosts and devils and aliens and whatever else, though my mom was always careful to impress upon me that all of these were in fact real and all were the minions of Satan, which didn’t stop her from letting me dress in elaborate hand-made cartoon character costumes on Halloween. When I was around fourteen, I had a number of formative moments, ranging from getting really into Aliens (I owned a bunch of the Dark Horse novels — to this day I prefer the Dark Horse take on the Xenoverse over anything since Prometheus) to discovering Stephen King and Dracula — this latter being via playing an old DOS game called Dracula in London. I’ve been a big horror fan ever since — especially once horror video games started to take off. Resident Evil, Silent Hill, I was there for them. My favorite parts of the Thief games tend to be the scary ones. And of course I’ll never not love Doom, which I first played in 1994 but got really into in my late teens — it’s long gone now with a change in forum software, but my first registration at Doomworld was in 1999. (My current account dates to 2004.)
I’ve never been shy about my love for horror, and neither was Lovecraft, whom I also discovered as a teenager (I don’t really remember how I’d heard of him — I’m tempted to say the Doom novelization, because that would be the funniest answer) and borrowed a ton of his collections from the library in my first couple years in college. For all the ink spilled about his virulent xenophobia — which I largely attribute to the fact that he was a weirdo shutin who mostly communicated via letters — there’s no denying that in his heyday he was something of an expert on horror literature. In 1925 someone asked him to do a survey of weird fiction as it stood in the present moment; it took him two years to amass voluminous research on the subject but he ultimately presented it in 1927 in a short-lived magazine called The Recluse. Several years later he would revise and update the essay and publish it serially in Fantasy Fan, the first weird fiction fanzine, though the magazine folded before the series finished. The complete revised version of the essay finally appeared posthumously in the short story collection The Outsider and Others.
The essay is broken up into ten chapters. The first couple of chapters lay out the early history of horror as a genre, dating back to the earliest folklore. He then spends three chapters talking about the rise and fall of Gothic fiction, touching on the likes of Horace Walpole and Mary Shelley. Chapter VI, “Spectral Literature on the Continent,” is a survey of continental Europe’s contribution to weird fiction before, during and after the nineteenth century. He also dedicates an entire chapter to the man who most influenced Lovecraft as a writer: Edgar Allan Poe, which serves as good a segue as any into his discussion of weird fiction in America and then Britain, before finally capping the whole thing off with a lengthy review of then-modern authors like Arthur Machen.
At only 28,000 words, it’s not a terribly long essay — the main reason it took me so long to get through it was because I insisted on reading along with the audiobook reading done by the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society. (The copy I was actually reading along with was the one you can see at the top of this page — an annotated edition by Lovecraft’s biographer S.T. Joshi. I often would pause the audiobook to look at the notes in the back.) But it’s an interesting one, because while there had been discussion of the horror lit scene throughout the 19th century, these were often relegated to brief essays or commentary in letters. As far as I can tell — and I’m admittedly no scholar — there doesn’t seem to be anywhere near as extensive a discussion of horror fiction as a genre until Lovecraft’s essay. Of course, nowadays you can’t swing a racist-named cat without hitting some treatise on horror as a genre — be it literature, film, or video games — but in 1927, such discussion was apparently pretty muted.
What’s interesting about Supernatural Horror in Literature isn’t just what Lovecraft has to say about horror literature, but also how he tended to view the genre. He had a particular dislike for didactism and moralizing; he also as a rule didn’t care for more scientific approaches, either in the writing or by the characters. Lovecraft had his own opinions on what counted as “weird fiction” versus what didn’t — he was less interested in more straightforward psychological horror or the wholly human monsters that today you might find in serial killer or slasher flicks — and in so doing does a pretty good job of explaining some of the various subgenres of horror literature. It would appear that preparing for and writing the essay had a profound effect on Lovecraft as a horror writer himself — it’s worth noting that some of his best work was composed after the essay was published, and also he much more consistently left out his, let’s say unfortunate social views, from his stories. (This latter point coincided with a gradual softening of his racial and political views across the board, though he died of cancer before he could complete his transformation from “antebellum time traveler” to “almost not racist by 1930s standards.”)
In spite of his shortcomings as a person, I was a fan of Lovecraft’s stories when I was younger; but I had never read Supernatural Horror in Literature until I read it for this article. I found it illuminating both as a survey of the genre as it stood in 1927, and as a study into the insight of the man himself. Lovecraft was always driven by his own fears, rational and irrational. We’re talking about a guy who about fainted when he found out that an ancestor might have been Welsh and somehow turned that into tales of cursed bloodlines and unfeeling monstrosities from beyond the stars. (Sounds like Genestealer cults…) We can see his influence in everything from Aliens to BIONICLE to Channel Zero to Doom to Neon Genesis Evangelion. So much in horror and science fiction that we consider to be common tropes now can be laid at his feet, even stuff you wouldn’t think of as Lovecraftian — like Puella Magi Madoka Magica. (No, I’m serious — consider the unfeeling Kyubey, but also the nature of the Witches, as well as Homura’s use of time manipulation to become nearly all-powerful.)
We will always have to grapple with who Lovecraft was as a person, and I think some people — even some who should know better — are too quick to try and excuse him: “That’s just how people were at the time” (he was racist even by 1920s standards) or “find me one instance where he was racist in his stories” (I can find you several) or my favorite, “why does it matter if he was racist or not, just read the stories and separate the art from the artist” (the art is the artist, it matters because his worldview shaped his fiction.) But Lovecraft’s real legacy was his incredible talent for the Weird; for bringing readers to nightmare vistas unbeknownst to man, to impossible secrets in the dark, to vast, unknowable intelligences that think absolutely nothing of us as we would think nothing of ants.
I love horror. I love horror fiction, I love horror movies. I love horror video games — the fact that you’re here, reading this long ramble about everyone’s favorite dead xenophobe pulp horror writer is because I love horror video games so much that I decided to play a bunch of them in a loose chronological order and then things got out of hand. Growing up steeped in Evangelical hypocrisy and bullshit like I did, I like horror because it’s honest. It’s honest about who we are, what we are, where we are, and where we’re going. It’s no surprise that horror as a genre tends to evolve in the aftermath of war, with the Great War being the obvious example, but consider also how Night of the Living Dead and Aliens were shaped by the Vietnam War. Or how 9/11 and the ensuing War on Terror were reflected in horror fiction via collapsing buildings, torture, paranoia, cults, and a pervasive sense that we are being lied to. Horror is a reflection of collective human trauma, from the very base fears of the unknown to the abject terror that is other people. Horror has stuck around for so long because it’s something we collectively understand — even the kind of person who hates horror and claims not to understand why people like being scared, deep down gets what horror is, probably more than some people who actually do like horror. They just don’t like it, and that’s valid too. Not everyone wants to be reminded of their own mortality.
In the end, we go to horror movies, play horror games, read horror books, all for the same reason we tell scary stories around the campfire — horror stories are human stories, they are us, they are what draws us together as a community, because it’s one of the few things that truly unites us: no matter who we are, we’re all scared of the darkness at the edge of town.
