The New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft

1060 Pages·2014·29.22 MB·English

by  H. P. Lovecraft

TO HOWARD PHILLIPS LOVECRAFT
“I am Providence.”
Contents Introduction by Alan Moore
Foreword
Editor’s Note
THE STORIES
Dagon
The Statement of Randolph Carter
Beyond the Wall of Sleep
Nyarlathotep
The Picture in the House
Herbert West: Reanimator
The Nameless City
The Hound
The Festival
The Unnamable
The Call of Cthulhu
The Silver Key
The Case of Charles Dexter Ward
The Colour Out of Space
The Dunwich Horror
The Whisperer in Darkness
At the Mountains of Madness
The Shadow over Innsmouth
The Dreams in the Witch House
The Thing on the Doorstep
The Shadow Out of Time
The Haunter of the Dark
ADDITIONAL MATERIAL
Appendix 1: Chronological Table
Appendix 2: Faculty of Miskatonic University
Appendix 3: History of the Necronomicon
Appendix 4: Genealogy of the Elder Races
Appendix 5: The Works of H. P. Lovecraft
Appendix 6: The “Revisions” of H. P. Lovecraft
Appendix 7: H. P. Lovecraft in Popular Culture
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Introduction
by Alan Moore
W
ith an increasing distance from the twentieth century and concomitant
broadening of cultural perspective, the New England poet, author, essayist, and
stunningly profuse epistoler Howard Phillips Lovecraft is beginning to emerge
as one of that tumultuous period’s most critically fascinating and yet enigmatic
figures. Lovecraft is intriguing for not only the rich substrate of astonishing and
sometimes prescient ideas that is the bedrock of his work, but for the sheer
unlikelihood of his ascent into the ranks of the respected U.S. literary canon:
Progeny of mentally ill parents and product of an estranging cloistered
upbringing, he wrote a scant few dozen short tales and some longer pieces that
were published only in sensational and stigmatized pulp magazines during his
lifetime, if indeed they were published at all. After his 1937 death, the earliest
mainstream response was typified by critic Edmund Wilson’s withering
dismissal, and even those parties most responsible for keeping Lovecraft’s name
alive would often only do so by (perhaps unwittingly) misrepresenting
Lovecraft’s fiction, his philosophy, and his essential nature as a human being.
Furthermore, acceptance of his output as substantial literature has undeniably
been hindered by his problematic stance on most contemporary issues, with his
racism, alleged misogyny, class prejudice, dislike of homosexuality, and anti-
Semitism needing to be both acknowledged and addressed before a serious
appraisal of his work could be commenced. Such is the mesmerizing power of
Lovecraft’s language and imagination that despite these obstacles he is today
revered to a degree comparable with that of his formative idol Edgar Allan Poe,
a posthumous trajectory from pulp to academia that is perhaps unique in modern
letters.
As for Lovecraft’s status as enigma, while this is implied by the perpetually
expanding sphere of critical attention that attempts to penetrate his complex
worldview and unusual persona, surely the real mystery lies in our continuing
capacity to find him and his work mysterious. He lived for only forty-six years
during an unusually well-documented period of recent history and in addition
saw fit to record his daily doings, thoughts, and observations for the greater part
of that short lifespan in a multitude of letters, possibly a hundred thousand such,
according to some estimates, some running to extraordinary lengths and a great
many of them archived or preserved in print. With even the minutiae of his
dreams available; with structuralist, poststructuralist, and psychological analyses
of his most juvenile or marginal material proliferating by the day, how can there
be a molecule of H. P. Lovecraft’s world or circumstance or psyche that remains
to be examined? What is the source of our enduring curiosity regarding this
unworldly and aggressively old-fashioned individual?
Born in 1890, with his first great rush of literary productivity occurring in the
roaring, emblematic year of 1920, Lovecraft came of age in an America yet to
cohere as a society, much less as an emergent global superpower, and still beset
by a wide plethora of terrors and anxieties. The twenty years since the beginning
of the century had seen the largest influx of migrants and refugees that the
immigrant-founded nation had heretofore experienced, bringing with them fears
that the established European settler stock might soon be overwhelmed by
sprawling foreign populations or diluted by pernicious interbreeding and
miscegenation. On the streets of Harlem, Greenwich Village, Times Square, and
the Bowery in New York, a novel populace of highly visible and
unapologetically flamboyant homosexual men (and women, albeit less
noticeably) were establishing themselves, much to the consternation of the city’s
moral arbiters. This was the year when women’s suffrage would be finally
achieved—a period of industrial unrest and widespread strikes that seemed all
the more worrying in the wake of Russia’s only recently concluded revolution.
All of these prevailing fears, afflicting an extremely broad swath of conventional
American society, would find expression in the writing and the ideology of H. P.
Lovecraft. However, Lovecraft’s intellect and omnivorous reading habits meant
that he was capable of understanding and experiencing a still wider spectrum of
unease than the beleaguered average citizen. Contemporaneous advances in
humanity’s expanding comprehension of the universe with its immeasurable
distances and its indifferent random processes had redefined, dramatically,
mankind’s position in the cosmos. Far from being the whole point and purpose
of creation, human life became a motiveless and accidental outbreak on a
vanishingly tiny fleck of matter situated in the furthest corner of a stupefying
swarm of stars, itself but one of many such swarms strewn in incoherent disarray
across black vastness inconceivable. These possibly more rarefied yet more
unsettling and fundamental phobias would also be articulated in the work of the
Rhode Island visionary, as his pantheon of mindless or chaotic cosmic powers or
in his much-loved everyday New England landscape altered and infected by
conceptions from beyond.
In this light, it is possible to perceive Howard Lovecraft as an almost
unbearably sensitive barometer of American dread. Far from outlandish
eccentricities, the fears that generated Lovecraft’s stories and opinions were
precisely those of the white, middle-class, heterosexual, Protestant-descended
males who were most threatened by the shifting power relationships and values
of the modern world. Though he may have regarded himself, in accordance with
the view held of him by his readership and even those that knew him personally,
as an embodiment of his most emblematic fable, “The Outsider,” in his frights
and panics he reveals himself as that almost unheard-of fluke statistical
phenomenon, the absolutely average man, an entrenched social insider unnerved
by new and alien influences from without. This, it might be suggested, is the
underlying reason for our ongoing absorption in his work, a fascination that
seems only to increase as Lovecraft and his times recede into the past: In H. P.
Lovecraft’s tales, we are afforded an oblique and yet unsettlingly perceptive
view into the haunted origins of the fraught modern world and its attendant
mind-set that we presently inhabit. Coded in an alphabet of monsters,
Lovecraft’s writings offer a potential key to understanding our current dilemma,
although crucial to this is that they are understood in the full context of the place
and times from which they blossomed.
This, by a circuitous route, brings us to Leslie S. Klinger’s The New
Annotated H. P. Lovecraft. In the previously mentioned rapidly dilating sphere
of Lovecraft scholarship, it would appear that Mr. Klinger has succeeded
admirably in the unenviable effort of appending Lovecraft’s oeuvre in a manner
that is not redundant or repetitive, but rather complementary to the body of
existing commentary. Even more notably, the welcome strategy of focusing
upon the sociohistoric references in Lovecraft’s narratives—casually mentioned
items or events the full import of which might easily escape the reader of today
—allows us to locate this hard-to-categorize author in the context of the era that
engendered him, assisted by the text’s profusion of illuminating photographic
reference. If, as maintained above, an understanding of his fiction is not possible
without consideration of the societal landscape that surrounded him, such an
approach is surely necessary.
In addition to this careful referencing of the gentleman from Providence’s
times and circumstances, Mr. Klinger understands the need to study Lovecraft’s
work through the variety of fine-ground lenses that are now available to us by