Dr. Simon Reads Appendix N Part Sixteen: HP Lovecraft

Dr. Simon Reads Appendix N Part Sixteen: HP Lovecraft

This is an ongoing sporadic series, in which I explore classic fantasy and science fiction works. Appendix N is the bibliography of Gary Gygax's original Dungeon Masters Guide, and lists a range of classic SF and fantasy authors that influenced his interest in the fantastical. See the first part of this series for more information.

This time around, I have reached the works of:

HP Lovecraft

Howard Philips Lovecraft is one of the handful Appendix N authors who I think will require no introduction to most people familiar with fantastic fiction. Arguably the Father of Weird Fiction (with Dunsany being the Fun Uncle of Weird Fiction) much of Lovecraft’s inventions have found their way into the general consciousness, up to plushy Cthulhus, and one of the few authors in this list to have had their name turned into an adjective (I’d say also Dunsanian, Tolkienesque and possibly Moorcockian could be added to Lovecraftian).

Born in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1890, and spending most of his life in New England except for a brief, largely unhappy, spell in New York, eventually dying of colon cancer in 1937. From what I can tell of his biography, Lovecraft never made much money from his writing, luckily having a wealthy wife (before she (a) lost everything in the Stock Market Crash and (b) later divorced him). Actually, that was his second wife, Sonia Greene, his first wife Susie having died of complications after a gallbladder infection. Ill health seems to have dogged Lovecraft and his family, and Lovecraft’s apparent sensitivity to cold informs several of his works.

Lovecraft also has several connections to other authors in these works – he met, and idolised, Dunsany, and in turn met and was idolised by RE Howard; Lovecraft providing some sympathy to Howard’s family after his suicide, and the story The Shadow Out of Time features mention of a character from Howard’s Cimmeria. August Derleth (posthumously) published Lovecraft, and he and others including L Sprague DeCamp and Lin Carter continued to use Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos in their writing.

But First

Before we get into the stories themselves, a useful HP Lovecraft primer is in order.

 

A Gambrel Roof – steeply sloped in the lower portion and often extending to the ground floor.

 

A Gibbous Moon – a moon that is slightly past half (either waxing or waning) such that the terminator shows a slight bulge.

 Cyclopean – descriptive of architecture made with large irregular blocks not held together with mortar.

 

Non-Euclidean – geometry where the surface is curved.

And now you know some of HPL’s favourite words, we can begin.

The Works

I managed to get the entire body of Lovecraft’s work in an eBook for a whopping 75p, and unlike cheap eBooks often are, this one was well indexed and hyperlinked. I’m not sure how it was ordered – most of the major works are at the front, roughly alphabetical by title, followed by all of the shorter works alphabetically again, but then the first two in the anthology are again fairly short and not among the “classic” Lovecraft stories even though they feature classic elements.

Nevertheless, I thought that the first six-seven stories provided a nice synecdoche of his works to dive into, before picking at some of the longer stories.

The Nameless City is very Dunsanian (see, adjectives), with a dash of Tomb Raider, with the narrator seeking out a lost city in the Arabian desert. As the narrator plunges deeper into the tunnels beneath the city, he pieces together a history of a reptilian race that existed long before mankind, and at the climax it is revealed that the winds that occasionally blow through the tunnels are actually some insubstantial form of these reptile people – whether reduced to ghosts, or if this is their true form (see The Dunwich Horror shortly), is left undeclared. Notably, this story features mention of the Necronomicon and the classic couplet “That is not dead which can eternal lie, and with strange aeons even death may die” (which, as famous as it is, doesn’t seem to crop up in any other stories).

A similar narrative of an inevitable descent to disaster happens in The Festival (and, indeed, is a narrative theme throughout much of Lovecraft’s work). This one is set in a fictional rural New England, fulfilling yet another Lovercraftian trope; in this case, the setting is the village of Kingsport rather than Arkham. The first-person narrator is heading to his ancestral home for a Yuletide festival, hinted to be much older than more modern notions of Christmas (Lovecraft usually uses the solstices as being times of the greatest mythos activity). Lovecraft has a reputation for somewhat turgid prose, and this one is a great example, going to great lengths with too many adjectives and long, long sentences.

For example, “We went out into the moonless and tortuous network of that incredibly ancient town; went out as the lights in the curtained windows disappeared one by one, and the Dog Star leered at the throng of cowled, cloaked figures that poured silently from every doorway and formed monstrous processions up this street and that, past the creaking signs and antediluvian gables, the thatched roofs and diamond-paned windows; threading precipitous lanes where decaying houses overlapped and crumbled together, gliding across open courts and churchyards where the bobbing lanthorns made eldritch drunken constellations.”

Phew!

Note, references to stars and decay (although these buildings are 17^th century at worst, come on!), also although there are some monstrous winged mounts that appear, the crowd of worshippers itself takes on attributes of a Lovecraftian horror, described as “oozing” or “crawling”. Really not a great story, but very much exemplary of some of his work.

He does later parody himself in the story The Unnameable, wherein the narrator is a clear authorial insert, discoursing with a friend who derides his writing as using too many adjectives yet too readily referring the things as “indescribable”.

Much better is The Colour Out Of Space, the first of many in the collection concerning a remote corner of Arkham County being menaced by Creatures From Beyond. What makes Colour better than some is that the menace isn’t some be-tentacled thing, but something that is possibly gaseous, that may or may not be sentient, but is essentially a strange glowing force from outer space that begins to warp the flora and fauna around a hapless farm, before draining the life force from all around it, including ultimately the farmer and his family. I recently saw a pretty woeful film starring Natalie Portman called “Annihilation” which used this same conceit, but also tried to be like an Aliens/Predator body horror/squad in dangerous territory narrative, badly. Don’t bother with the film, but read this story.

Back to Lovecraft, though, and next in the sequence is The Call of Cthulhu. Given that Sandy Peterson’s enduring role-playing game for Chaosium is named for this story, and given that it features what is the most iconic of the Old Ones, and given how it explores so many of Lovecraft’s recurring themes, it’s an oddly slight little story. For one thing, the narrator is never directly involved, but is more of a curator of material related to the Cthulhu cult (in that respect it’s a little like Wuthering Heights, or Dracula, that have weird narrative frameworks of reports within reports). It’s divided into three chapters, and in the first the narrator investigates a rash of artistic types who have all had strange dreams, and compulsions to paint or sculpt weird scenes like Richard Dreyfuss in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, one of which is a statuette of what we know to be Cthulhu.

In the second chapter, we hear from a police detective who has found a similar statue in the course of an investigation into strange cults worshipping this Cthulhu creature, and here we see the first of Lovecraft’s uncomfortable views on race – the Cthulhu cult is described as prevalent not only among non-Western “savage” cultures, but also “mulattos”, and we will see what could be thinly veiled references to the dangers of racial intermixing in later stories, where “degenerate” types  are interbred between white people and outsiders – in this case, scaly outsiders from outer space or under the sea. It’s there if you look for it, but then also it’s not clear if this is in the eye of the beholder – I will explore this more later.

Finally, we get the testimony of a sailor who ends up landing on the risen R’Lyeh, home to Cthulhu, and we also get plenty of Lovecraft’s favourite description of architecture that is “Cyclopean” (meaning built from big stone blocks, basically), and non-Euclidean (which is really just geometry with curves in it). Somewhat disappointingly, Cthulhu can be dispatched, albeit temporarily, by driving a boat into his head. Note, also, for all his infamy, that this is the only story to actually feature Cthulhu, and he gets at best a mention in a couple of others.

We return to Arkham County with The Dunwich Horror, which again has a remote New England farming village menaced by Creatures From Beyond. This one, however, mixes it up a bit. If you recall August Derleth, the Whateley family are a running theme in his works, and here we learn more about them; one branch being particularly “degenerate” with a reputation for black magic. The albino and mentally impaired Lavinia Whateley is pregnant by an unknown partner, and before you can say "Rosemary's Baby", the resultant son Wilbur grows strangely quickly and is described with a “goat-like” quality to him, it’s pitched as if it’s a traditional story of devil worship (especially with the hints at black masses amid stone circles on top of strange mountains), but being Lovecraft, we later learn that the “father” of Wilbur is Yog-Sothoth, and we learn that Wilbur (who gets killed by a dog) has a “brother” who, as the story tells us “takes more after the father”. The “other” is a strange bulky monster of tentacles, mouths, and stubby legs, that crushes its ways through the hapless nearby farms, but it’s also invisible until exposed by the “powder of Ibn Ghazi”. There’s some dramatic stuff where the villagers and Miskatonic U men team up to banish the monster using ancient rituals. It’s a pretty good one.

Finally in the initial batch, is The Whisperer in Darkness, where once again a Miskatonic U man (Albert Wilmarth) investigates strange goings on in remote Arkham County. Here, the isolated farm of one Henry Akeley is menaced by strange crustacean-looking creatures that have some of the local humans on their side as well. As Akeley’s peril grows, and he and Wilmarth exchange letters investigating the old tales of things living in the hills, suddenly Akeley changes his attitude and claims to have befriended these creatures, that can traverse space and come to Earth to mine certain minerals. He invites Wilmarth to visit him, reminding him to bring along every copy of the evidence that he has previously sent him. Wilmarth is obviously completely non-genre savvy because he complies.

This is the story that introduces the Mi-Go, the Fungi from Yuggoth and, although the letter exchanges seem like a clumsy plot device (oddly, it would work better with more modern communication as you could have Akeley getting cut off in the middle of a call, and shaky phone camera footage; the Mi-Go don’t show up on film as their electrons “vibrate at a different frequency”, but their sound can be recorded on wax cylinder). Um … Lovecraft’s long sentences are rubbing off on me. Seem like a clumsy plot device, but the growing sense of menace is well built.

These barely scratch the surface of Lovecraft’s work, however. It overlooks the longer, and probably some of the most iconic, of Lovecraft’s work; the novel The Strange Case of Charles Dexter Ward, which sees the height of the Arkham Horror style with the young Ward taken over by a wizardly ancestor, and tunnels full of failed undead, and the almost-novel At The Mountains of Madness, which at first feels like a Jules Verne detailed travelogue of an expedition to the Antarctic, with the slow and lengthy revelation of ancient races and still-living horrors; following much the same narrative as The Nameless City but much longer, and better. Here we get a good outline of the history of Earth as seen under the Cthulhu Mythos and the succession of alien invaders.

 

And then there are the Dreamworld stories, written much in the style of Dunsany. Longest is The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath, but this draws on shorter works like The Cats of Ulthar, Celephais, The White Ship and even Pickman’s Model, which is more of an Arkham Horror tale. The Dreamworld stories feature locations in a fantastic world of Earth’s dreams, sometimes beautiful, other times dark and terrible. If you like Dunsany, you’ll probably appreciate these.

As well as Dunsany, Lovecraft will sometimes feel like Edgar Allen Poe, with tales of haunted houses or dark family secrets that are unrelated to the Cthulhu Mythos. Such, for example, as The Shunned House with something dreadful lurking beneath (which even mentions Poe), or the fun reverse ghost story The Outsider. If you go the full works, we even see a sense of humour from Lovecraft, in the spoof melodrama Sweet Ermengarde (and not, as is tempting, Ermahgerd). Ehrmagerd! Mernsters!

 

Lovecraft does like to reference other authors, poets, and artists, including Poe, Dunsany, and Clark Ashton Smith (who I still think is a strange omission from Appendix N). The nice thing about doing this in a modern age is that when Lovecraft says that the structures in At The Mountains of Madness resemble “the Asian paintings of Roerich”, I can look this up and find out what he’s talking about:

 

Lovecraft and Race

The Wikipedia entry for Lovecraft boldly announces that he was a white supremacist which, well, he may have been (it was after all quite popular in the 1920s and 30s), but this doesn’t really come through in his stories. Certainly unlike Edgar Rice Burroughs or Robert E Howard there’s little or no casting of darker-skinned people as “savages”, shifty, or cowardly.

Okay, yes, in Herbert West, Reanimator, a black boxer is described as being “ape-like”, but perhaps this is as much due to his profession as his ethnicity. Maybe.

And yes, in The Rats in the Walls there is a black cat with what nowadays is a fantastically racist name, but since the cat is quite heroic in the story, it feels more like just a very dated, almost term of endearment, placed with a lack of modern sensibility more than malice. Lovecraft must have owned a black cat at one time, as they crop up quite often in his stories in pretty heroic roles.

And, yes, I mentioned the overtones above in The Call of Cthulhu that foreigners are weird and not to be trusted. However, there are just as many weird and untrustworthy people in his stories that trace their ancestry back to Pilgrim times. And also yes, one could if one squinted read The Shadow Over Innsmouth as a parable against mixing races, with the strange Innsmouth curse being blamed by rumour on a sea captain bringing back a “foreign” wife. Except that in this case she’s a fish person. But, again, Lovecraft just as often features degenerate families that have inbred too much, so he’s perhaps not against out-marrying entirely.

And, yes, there is an obvious Euro-centrism to his tales; inevitably his protagonists tend towards the same kind of bookish New Englander, but throughout the stories don’t point towards the inevitable superiority of the White European (as do ERB and  RE Howard), but rather the opposite. For all their vaunted learning and technology, the American Man of Science is but a pitiful speck of nothing in the face of the true powers of the cosmos. Which, perhaps, is to be expected of somebody writing after the Great War.

So, is Lovecraft racist? If he is, it really doesn’t come through in his stories. The only time a character expresses any overt racist language, he’s a German U-boat captain (in The Temple), even looking down on his fellow German crew who aren’t Prussian. On the other hand, his alter-ego Randolph Carter, teams up with ghouls and nightgaunts in The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath, showing companionship with the rejected and feared. I can only suggest approaching his works with an open mind and decide for yourself. I’ve read worse so far in this project.

Gaming Inspirations

The Cthulhu Mythos was originally featured in Deities and Demigods before it was removed at the request of the Lovecraft estate. And so once upon a time there were gaming stats for Deep Ones, Fungi from Yuggoth, Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth and others, all illustrated by Erol Otus who was sometimes able to capture the weirdness and sometimes made it too cartoony.

Without that, there are few direct references, although the G-D-Q module series features Lovecraftian elements scattered throughout; the temples of the Elder Elemental God with their altars that can open onto starry space wherein tentacles emerge to draw in the unfortunate – straight out of Lovecraft. The whole D1-3 sequence of Descent into the Depths of the Earth through to Vault of the Drow, is reminiscent of Lovecraft’s oft-used descent into ancient ruins – seen in At the Mountains of Madness, The Nameless City, and The Shadow Out of Time. Other stories have dungeon-crawly elements to them, usually networks of serial-killer tunnels under ancient Arkham farmhouses, such as in The Dunwich Horror or The Strange Case of Charles Dexter Ward. Gary Gygax again invokes some Lovecraftian ideas with The Forgotten Temple of Tharizdun, with its strange banished god, and who knows, maybe the Gibbering Mouther (first seen in the Meso-American themed Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan) is inspired by the Shoggoth.

The obvious thing would be to just play Call of Cthulhu, but so many of the stories can be adapted to a fantasy setting. The Dreamworld settings can just be lifted whole cloth – the nightgaunt-haunted slopes of Mount Ngranek wherein the faces of the Elder Gods are carved, for example. Plenty of necromancy, haunted houses, ancient ruins, and small towns with a dark secret can be easily converted to a fantasy setting. It’d be fun if players realised that they were, in fact, playing through The Shadow Over Innsmouth when you present them with a once-prosperous coastal town fallen into disrepair and decay, inhabited by strange folk worshipping strange gods, and a reef off the coast with a terrible reputation.

Later editions, of course, bring in notions such as the Far Realm, and Great Old One-like origins for various aberrations, but one doesn’t need be-tentacled monsters to be Lovecraftian, and in fact using the other elements could possibly be more rewarding and less of a cliché.