This Revolting Graveyard of the Universe: the Horror Fiction of H. P. Lovecraft

Abstract

The twentieth century has had two major sources of inspiration for the horrific imagination. The first is Hollywood, where modern cinematographic technology has been used to reproduce the Romantic Gothic worlds of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Gaston Le Roux’s Phantom of the Opera and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The work of Universal and other studios’ horror movies have been widely distributed and are well known, appearing nowadays regularly on television. The second major influence is the work of Howard Phillips Lovecraft, a pulp-fiction writer whose short life ended before the Second World War. Where the studios were motivated by publicity and commercialism, Lovecraft was motivated by horror of publicity and by a disgust with commercial enterprise. Lovecraft remains, fifty years after his death, an enigmatic writer and a strange and stranded personality. He wrote ‘popular fiction’ which never was and still is not popular; he considered himself a man of letters who wrote exclusively for pulp magazines; he instinctively felt that he was a gentleman but was actually the son of a commercial salesman; and he was a writer in the early twentieth century who owed nothing to the work of James, Eliot, Pound or Lawrence. His output was small, consisting of two novellas (one published after his death) and some short stories, many of which were completed by others after his death.