buy The Dunwich Horror and Others by H.P. Lovecraft at Amazon
Author: H.P. Lovecraft
Release date: April, 1985
Media: Hardcover
ISBN: 0870540378
Robert Bloch's rambling 1982 essay, 'Heritage of Horror,' weakly introduces the book. Ultimately, no good will come of the recent attempts to elevate Lovecraft, Icarus-like, into the higher pantheon of Western literature. That Lovecraft was a relatively influential contributor to 20th century popular culture-one among tens of thousands--is indisputable, and requires no defending. But Lovecraft came from the pulps and belongs with the pulps, belongs with Edgar Rice Burroughs, with Batman and Spider Man comic books, the Bug-Eyed-Monster films of the fifties, Warren Publishing's Eerie, Creepy, and Vampirella horror magazines of the sixties and seventies, and, more recently, the novels of Stephen King and Clive Barker. Representative episodes of Rod Serling's Twilight Zone or Joseph Stephano's Outer Limits had more artistry and integrity than anything in the Lovecraft oeuvre, which is to say that Lovecraft, unlike Hoffman, Lewis, Lafanu or Poe, never rose above his genre. Political efforts to raise Lovecraft's work above itself only doubly underscore what a poor writer Lovecraft often was, and worse, takes the fun out of reading him. Note that Bloch repeats the old saw that Lovecraft has been "frequently ranked as the equal of Poe." Over the last thirty years, dozens of Lovecraft enthusiasts have repeated this entirely gratuitous comment in print without actually daring to declare it themselves; the comparison belongs to the world of advertising and not to that of fact. Bloch spends time pointlessly defending Lovecraft against charges of madness and homosexuality, which is a stance that results when struggling to inflate a Frazetta into a Matisse. Bloch's statement that Lovecraft "may well have had more influence on other writers than any contemporary except Ernest Hemingway" is pure weird-story histrionics. Is the truth about Lovecraft's work and worth so fragile that attempts have to be made to forcibly seat him at the same table as Proust, Faulkner, Rilke, Yeats, Genet, Dinesen, Eliot, Woolf, and Hemingway? Lovecraft doesn't belong at the second-tier table of Celine, Djuna Barnes, Jean Rhys, Denton Welch, Paul Bowles, Colette, Erskine Caldwell, Rupert Brooke, and Carl Sandburg either. Nor at the third.
Bloch's partisan statement that with the 'Cthulhu Mythos' Lovecraft "built up a rationale for both reality and dreams, nothing less than a history of the entire universe" is pure bunk. He tries to bolster Lovecraft's creative superiority by stating that while hundreds of writers have placed their stories within Lovecraft's imaginary universe, few or none have "set their sagas" in those created by Tolkien or C. S. Lewis. The obvious point concerning Tolkien and Lewis is that their novels involved muscular, definitive narratives that were written to completion, wherein Lovecraft's 'mythos' was merely a loosely strewn jumble of ideas, moods, and catch-phrases spread across a dozen or so stories. All a writer need do is have a deranged character yell "Yog Sothoth!" several times in repetition while jumping on one foot and they've created a story in the 'Cthulhu Mythos.'
1933's'The Thing On The Doorstep' brings together all of Lovecraft's sublimated and projected sexual obsessions in one unsubtle outing. Interestingly, literal projection of consciousness is one of its plot elements. As in most of his later stories, the mystery and suspense are almost immediately gutted by foreshadowing so heavy that readers will find it impossible not to guess most of what is to come. Here, Lovecraft rolls together elements of incest, gender reversal, homosexuality, spiritual transvestitism, sexual perversion, and family degeneration, eventually patching together a kind of negative alchemical hermaphrodite. Far from a transcendent symbol of perilously evolved human consciousness, Lovecraft's hermaphrodite is the dwarfed, rotting, thyroid-eyed 'thing' of the title. While similar tales by Poe and Arthur Machen genuinely unsettle and disturb, readers may find the overanxious and tiring 'The Thing On The Doorstep' only mildly revolting. Lovecraft's later tales largely reflect a semi-realized atheistic hysteria and a repulsive attitude towards all aspects of nature, and 'The Thing On The Doorstep" is no exception.
Lovecraft was a genre writer who had a single theme: human degeneracy. He relied on a repetition of cheap, stilted effects to achieve his ends, and was rarely able to write a straight sentence without heaping it with a superabundance of awkward adjectives. Objectivity about his word usage, themes, and the end results of his labor was not one of his strengths, and to pretend otherwise is nonsense. He usually preferred to introduce his horrors within his first few pages and then wind his plot down from there, usually ending each story with a revelation that the narrator finds unbearable but the reader does not; 'The Whisperer In Darkness' and the silly 'The Shadow Out Of Time,' both included here, fit this formula. Lovecraft's early stories, like 'The Picture In The House,' are generally more restrained than his later work, and are the better for it. The first section of 'The Dunwich Horror,' one of Lovecraft's most enjoyable and well-paced stories, shows what a capable writer Lovecraft could be when he disciplined himself and his imagination. As the years passed, his horror formulas grew more complicated, outstripping his talent, which didn't evolve. Readers will note that in at least three of the stories here, lightning acts as a deus ex machine, 'unexpectedly' settling matters 'once and finally,' and resolving none of Lovecraft's themes.
Arkham House was started over a half century ago to specifically promote Lovecraft's work, and has clearly been very successful. Therefore, their editions should have an extra value to Lovecraft enthusiasts the world over. - an Amazon customer review