Sean Moreland - New Directions in Supernatural Horror Literature The Critical Influence of H. P. Lovecraft

Edit ED B Y
s ea n m o rel a nd
The Critical
Influence of
H. P. Lovecraft
New Directions in Supernatural Horror Literature
Sean Moreland
Editor
New Directions
in Supernatural
Horror Literature
The Critical Influence of H. P. Lovecraft
Editor
Sean Moreland
University of Ottawa
Ottawa, ON, Canada
ISBN 978-3-319-95476-9 ISBN 978-3-319-95477-6 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95477-6
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018954728
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This book is dedicated to Caitlín R. Kiernan and Thomas Ligotti, who have
opened holes in the world that can never be closed, and to the late, greatly
lamented David G. Hartwell, whose editorial vision helped shape the course
of horror literature in the late twentieth century and who did so much to
promote and refine it.
Acknowledgments
The impetus for this collection came from conversations with many friends
and colleagues, some of whose critical works can be found in the pages
that follow. Others, whose work doesn’t appear between these covers, also
deserve thanks for their inspiration of, suggestions for, or help with this
volume: these include Aalya Ahmad, S. J. Bagley, Rajiv Bhola, Matt
Cardin, Bobby Derie, Robert D’Errico, Derek Newman-Stille, David
Nickle, Lydia Peever, Dennis Quinn, and Ranylt Richildis. This book also
came about in part due to work presented in the Horror Literature
Division of the ever-generative International Conference on the Fantastic
in the Arts. My thanks go to the conference organizers and to Rhonda
Brock-Servais, former Division Head and perpetual High Priestess of
Horror. Thanks are also due to the Association of part-time professors at
the University of Ottawa, for helping fund my annual participation in the
conference.
Most importantly, my boundless gratitude belongs to my wife,
Madeleine, who makes everything possible, including playing the dancing
clown machine.
vii
Contents
1 Introduction: The Critical (After)Life of Supernatural

Horror in Literature 1
Sean Moreland
Section I “The Oldest and Strongest Emotion”: The

Psychology of Cosmic Horror 11
2 The Birth of Cosmic Horror from the S(ub)lime of

Lucretius 13
Sean Moreland
3 The Evolution of Horror: A Neo-Lovecraftian Poetics 43

Mathias Clasen
4 Ansky’s The Dybbuk, Freud’s Future of an Illusion,

Watson’s “Little Albert,” and Supernatural Horror
in Literature 61
Sharon Packer
5 Gazing Upon “The Daemons of Unplumbed Space” with

H. P. Lovecraft and Stephen King: Theorizing Horror
and Cosmic Terror 77
Alissa Burger
ix
x Contents
Section II “A Literature of Cosmic Fear”: Lovecraft,

Criticism, and Literary History 99
6 “Lothly Thinges Thai Weren Alle”: Imagining Horror in

the Late Middle Ages 101
Helen Marshall
7 Lovecraft’s Debt to Dandyism 127

Vivian Ralickas
8 Lovecraft and the Titans: A Critical Legacy 155

S. T. Joshi
9 Reception Claims in Supernatural Horror in Literature

and the Course of Weird Fiction 171
John Glover
Section III “The True Weird”: (Re)Defining the Weird 189
10 Bizarre Epistemology, Bizarre Subject: A Definition of

Weird Fiction 191
Michael Cisco
11 Speaking the Unspeakable: Women, Sex, and the

Dismorphmythic in Lovecraft, Angela Carter, Caitlín
R. Kiernan, and Beyond 209
Gina Wisker
12 Weird Cinema and the Aesthetics of Dread 235

Brian R. Hauser
13 Paranoia, Panic, and the Queer Weird 253

Brian Johnson
Index 279
Notes on Contributors
Alissa Burger is Assistant Professor of English and Director of Writing

Across the Curriculum at Culver-Stockton College. She teaches courses in
research, writing, and literature, including a single-author seminar
on Stephen King. She is the author of Teaching Stephen King: Horror,
The Supernatural, and New Approaches to Literature (Palgrave, 2016)
and The Wizard of Oz as American Myth: A Critical Study of Six Versions
of the Story, 1900–2007 (2012) and editor of the collection Teaching
Graphic Novels in the English Classroom: Pedagogical Possibilities of
Multimodal Literacy Engagement (Palgrave, 2017).
Michael Cisco is the author of the novels The Divinity Student, The
Tyrant, The San Veneficio Canon, The Traitor, The Narrator, The Great
Lover, Celebrant, and MEMBER, and a short story collection, Secret
Hours. His fiction has appeared in The Weird, Lovecraft Unbound, and
Black Wings (among others). His scholarly work has appeared in Lovecraft
Studies, The Weird Fiction Review, Iranian Studies, Lovecraft and Influence,
and The Lovecraftian Poe. He teaches in CUNY Hostos, New York City.
Mathias Clasen is Assistant Professor of Literature and Media at Aarhus
University, Denmark. He specializes in supernatural horror in literature
and film, particularly modern American horror, and he has published
works on zombies, vampires, Richard Matheson, Dan Simmons, and
Bram Stoker. His work aims at explaining the functions and forms of hor-
rifying entertainment by situating the study of the genre within a frame-
work informed by evolutionary and cognitive psychology as well as
xi
xii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
neuroscience. His monograph Why Horror Seduces (2018) investigates

modern American horror in film, literature, and video gaming within a
scientific framework.
John Glover is the Humanities Research Librarian at Virginia
Commonwealth University, where he supports students and faculty in their
research and instruction, pursues various outreach programs, and directs
Digital Pragmata, a digital arts and humanities initiative. In 2015 he pre-
sented “Node, Edge, or Tentacle: Data and the Lovecraftian Literary
Network” at the 36th International Conference on the Fantastic in the
Arts. His research interests include humanities librarianship, digital human-
ities, literary horror, and the research practices of creative writers. He speaks
regularly on research for creative writers, and in spring 2015, he co-taught
“Writing Researched Fiction” in VCU’s Department of English. As “J. T.
Glover,” he writes fiction and non-fiction, and his work has appeared in The
Children of Old Leech, The Lovecraft eZine, and New Myths, among others.
Brian R. Hauser is Assistant Professor of Film at Clarkson University in
Potsdam, New York. He has published essays on The X-Files and its rela-
tion to the vanishing Americans in James Fenimore Cooper’s novels, a
rhetorical narrative theory approach to cinematic adaptation, and the
importance of DIY-independent cinema. He is also a filmmaker and
screenwriter, who won the 2010 H. P. Lovecraft Film Festival Screenwriting
Competition with his feature-length script Cult Flick. He is completing a
monograph on weird cinema.
Brian Johnson is Associate Professor and Graduate Chair of English at
Carleton University where he teaches theory, genre fiction, and Canadian
literature. Recent publications include essays on serial killing in Canadian
crime fiction, the pedagogy of horror, libidinal ecology in Swamp Thing,
and alien genesis in H. P. Lovecraft and Ridley Scott’s Prometheus. His
research focuses on weird fiction, superheroes, and sexuality.
S. T. Joshi is a freelance writer and editor. He has prepared comprehensive
editions of Lovecraft’s collected fiction, essays, and poetry. He is also the
author of The Weird Tale (1990), The Modern Weird Tale (2001), and
Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction (2012). His award-
winning biography H. P. Lovecraft: A Life (1996) was later expanded as I
Am Providence: The Life and Times of H. P. Lovecraft (2010). He has also
prepared Penguin Classics editions of the work of Arthur Machen, Lord
Dunsany, Algernon Blackwood, M. R. James, and Clark Ashton Smith, as
well as the anthology American Supernatural Tales (2007).
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
xiii
Helen Marshall is a critically acclaimed author, editor, and medievalist.

After receiving a PhD from the prestigious Centre for Medieval Studies at
the University of Toronto, she spent two years completing a postdoctoral
fellowship at the University of Oxford, investigating literature written dur-
ing the time of the Black Death. She was recently appointed Lecturer of
Creative Writing and Publishing at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge,
England.
Sean Moreland His essays, primarily focused on Gothic, horror and
weird fiction in its literary, cinematic, and sequential art guises, have
appeared in many collections, encyclopaedic volumes, and journals, most
recently Lovecraftian Proceedings 2 and The Oxford Handbook of Edgar
Allan Poe. He recently edited The Lovecraftian Poe: Essays on Influence,
Reception, Interpretation and Transformation (2017). He is in the midst
of a monograph, tentatively titled Repulsive Influences: A Historical Poetics
of Atomic Horror, which examines how horror literature since the early
eighteenth century has interwoven with the reception of Lucretius’s De
Rerum Natura in shaping popular anxieties about materialism and mor-
tality. He teaches in the English Department at the University of Ottawa
and occasionally conducts interviews, writes reviews, and blogs about
weirdness at Postscripts to Darkness (www.pstdarkness.com).
Sharon Packer is a psychiatrist and psychopharmacologist in private
practice and Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Icahn School of
Medicine at Mount Sinai. She is also an author and a prolific writer whose
most recent book is Neuroscience in Science Fiction (2015).
Vivian Ralickas holds her PhD in Comparative Literature from the
University of Toronto. Her published works include art criticism, transla-
tions, and two essays on Lovecraft: “Art, Cosmic Horror, and the
Fetishizing Gaze in the Fiction of H. P. Lovecraft” (2008) and “‘Cosmic
Horror’ and the Question of the Sublime in Lovecraft” (2007). She
teaches English Composition and Literature, including courses on horror
fiction and Dandyism, at Marianopolis College in Montreal.
Gina Wisker is Professor of Contemporary Literature and Higher
Education. Her principal teaching, PhD supervision, and research interests
lie in contemporary women’s writing, Gothic, horror, and postcolonial
writing. Her published works include Margaret Atwood, an Introduction
to Critical Views of Her Fiction (2012), Key Concepts in Postcolonial
Writing (2007), Horror Fiction (2005), and Postcolonial and African
American Women’s Writing (2000).
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: The Critical (After)Life

of Supernatural Horror in Literature
Sean Moreland
In 1925, writer and publisher W. Paul Cook (1881–1948) invited his

friend and fellow amateur journalist H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) to write
a historical and critical survey of supernatural literature. Already an avid
reader, and increasingly an accomplished writer, of such fiction, Lovecraft
committed to this task with an ambitious course of reading including
acknowledged classics, less well-known historical works, and many con-
temporary fictions of the strange and supernatural, most of them by British
and American writers. His research and preparation was such that it took
Lovecraft nearly two years to submit the manuscript to Cook for
publication.1
The initial, and only partial, first publication of the essay occurred in
1927, in what turned out to be the sole volume of Cook’s journal, The
Recluse. Lovecraft’s most ambitious and influential critical work,
Supernatural Horror in Literature (hereafter SHL) would reach only a
handful of readers at this time. Nevertheless, by the end of the twentieth
century, SHL was widely recognized as exerting an unparalleled influence
over the development and reception of Anglophone supernatural, horrific,
and weird literature. The essay’s core critical concepts continued to evolve
S. Moreland (*)
University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON, Canada
© The Author(s) 2018 1

S. Moreland (ed.), New Directions in Supernatural Horror
Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95477-6_1
2 S. MORELAND
in Lovecraft’s later career; one trajectory of this development, Lovecraft’s

changing assessment of the “titans” of early twentieth-century weird
fiction, is detailed by S. T. Joshi’s chapter in this volume. During Lovecraft’s
lifetime these critical concepts would reach a wider audience than the essay
itself due to their embodiment in his fictions and exposition via his volu-
minous letters, many of them to an epistolary circle of writers who adopted
and adapted his critical framework through their own writings, as John
Glover’s chapter elaborates.
SHL itself would posthumously reach a wider audience with its publica-
tion by Arkham House, first as part of The Outsider and Others (1939) and
then as part of Dagon and Other Macabre Tales (1965). Even at that point,
few could have predicted how its critical and popular influence would con-
tinue to grow, with Dover publishing an inexpensive paperback edition in
1973 to a greatly expanded readership. SHL’s public profile rose with the
onset of the mass market “Horror Boom” of the late 1970s and 1980s. In
1981, it received a belated endorsement in Stephen King’s biographically
inflected survey of horror, Danse Macabre, which suggested, “If you’d like
to pursue the subject [of earlier supernatural fiction] further, may I recom-
mend H. P. Lovecraft’s long essay Supernatural Horror in Literature? It is
available in a cheap but handsome and durable Dover paperback edition.”
King’s immensely popular writings, as Alissa Burger’s chapter explores,
did much to renew public interest in Lovecraft’s work in general.2
In 1987, influential editor and anthologist David G. Hartwell more
forcefully emphasized SHL’s importance to the development of modern
horror. His seminal anthology The Dark Descent: The Evolution of Horror
describes Lovecraft as “the most important American writer of horror fic-
tion in the first half of” the twentieth century, as well as “the theoretician
and critic who most carefully described the literature” with SHL, which
provides “the keystone upon which any architecture of horror must be
built: atmosphere.”3 Hartwell rightly singles out atmosphere as SHL’s
most important idea, as expressed in one of the most widely cited state-
ments in the essay. Atmosphere, Lovecraft insists, is the “all-important
thing, for the final criterion of authenticity is not the dovetailing of a plot,
but the creation of a given sensation” (23). The “true weird tale” (22)
creates an “atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer,
unknown forces,” with “a hint, expressed with a seriousness and porten-
tousness becoming its subject,” of “a malign and particular suspension or
defeat” of the laws of nature (23).4
INTRODUCTION: THE CRITICAL (AFTER)LIFE OF SUPERNATURAL… 3
Because of its insistence on atmosphere, Hartwell claims SHL is “the

most important essay on horror literature.”5 This assessment has been
echoed many times since. In More Things than Are Dreamt of: Masterpieces
of Supernatural Horror (1994), James Ursini and Alain Silver state,
“Lovecraft’s fame rests almost as heavily on his work as a scholar as that of
a writer of fiction,” due to his “now classic” survey of the field. They
locate SHL’s importance in its “expansive analysis of supernatural horror
and fantasy contrasted with the condescending tone of earlier essayists.”6
Cumulatively, such estimates reinforce S. T. Joshi’s claim, in the preface to
his annotated edition of SHL, that it is “widely acknowledged as the finest
historical treatment of the field.”7
Lovecraft took supernatural fiction very seriously, and was among the
first critics or theoreticians to do so consistently. He saw it as a crucial liter-
ary tradition with significant cultural value, deeply rooted in the evolved
nature of humanity and tied to the state of society, and therefore emi-
nently worthy of close study and focused aesthetic appreciation.
SHL reflects its author’s historical and cultural moment, his enthusi-
asms, prejudices, and anxieties, as much as his insights and capacity for
rigorous thought. It is Lovecraft’s most sustained attempt to reconcile
what a 1927 letter describes as his own “parallel natures”:
The world and all its inhabitants impress me as immeasurably insignificant,

so that I always crave intimations of larger and subtler symmetries than these
which concern mankind. All this, however, is purely aesthetic and not at all
intellectual. I have a parallel nature or phase devoted to science and logic,
and do not believe in the supernatural at all – my philosophical position
being that of a mechanistic materialist of the line of Leucippus, Democritus,
Epicurus and Lucretius – and in modern times, Nietzsche and Haeckel.8
Hardly a disinterested survey, SHL is Lovecraft’s attempt to think

through feeling, situating his “purely aesthetic” cravings intellectually by
providing a historical account of a literary form defined through an objec-
tification of affect. Both descriptive history and prescriptive canonization,
it opens with the resounding statement, “the oldest and strongest emo-
tion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of
the unknown,” (21) and then proposes that its ability to evoke this emo-
tion is the standard whereby the “literature of cosmic fear” should be
judged (23). SHL explains the appeal of supernatural and weird fiction
across history and cultures by presenting Lovecraft’s “intimations of larger
4 S. MORELAND
and subtler symmetries” as an elementary, “if not always universal” (21),

aspect of human psychology. The appeal of supernatural fiction is linked to
what Lovecraft elsewhere calls “the most ineradicable urge in the human
personality,” which is the desire “for ultimate reality.” This desire is “the
basis of every real religion” and philosophy, and “anything which enhances
our sense of success in this quest, be it art or religion, is the source of a
pricelessly rich emotional experience—and the more we lose this experi-
ence in religion, the more we need to get it in something else.”9 Lovecraft
sees supernatural literature’s chief value as its provision of such a rich emo-
tional experience in the form of “atmosphere.”
Lovecraft also took atmosphere very seriously. Like the notion of a
“structural emotion” or dominant tone developed by T. S. Eliot’s “Tradition
and the Individual Talent” (1919), Lovecraft’s atmosphere derives to a
large extent from Poe’s aesthetic criterion, the “Unity of Effect.”
Atmosphere offers a sense of expansion, a “feeling of magnification in the
cosmos—of having approached the universal a trifle more closely, and ban-
ished a little of our inevitable insignificance.”10 However, atmosphere also
takes on, in William F. Touponce’s words, “the primary meaning of histori-
cal authenticity in Lovecraft’s aesthetics.”11 Atmosphere is Lovecraft’s
refuge against the culture-corrosive maelstrom of modernity, offering an
eminently Eliotic “sensation of a sort of identification with our whole
civilization.”12
Lovecraft took civilization very seriously, too. In the same letter, he
claims to care not about individual human beings, but only about civiliza-
tion, by which he means “the state of development and organisation which
is capable of gratifying the complex mental-emotional-aesthetic needs of
highly evolved and acutely sensitive men.”13 Such men are SHL’s ideal
readers, with “minds of the requisite sensitiveness” to appreciate the seri-
ous atmosphere of the true weird tale (20). Despite the universality of
some of SHL’s insights and the expansive audience it has found since its
first publication, it is evident that Lovecraft envisioned his audience of
“acutely sensitive,” and sufficiently serious, readers as defined along gen-
der, class, and racial lines, as many of the contributions to this volume
examine.
The racial politics of Lovecraft’s atmosphere are prominent in SHL’s
typological approach to the supernatural literature of different cultures.
While justifying Lovecraft’s claim that the “literature of cosmic fear” (22)
is a trans-cultural, almost universal, human phenomenon stemming from
a “profound and elementary principle” (21), his brief discussions of non-
Anglo-Saxon examples emphasize their insufficient seriousness and cosmi-

cism. For example, “In the Orient, the weird tale tended to assume a
gorgeous colouration and sprightliness which almost transmuted it into
sheer phantasy. In the West, where the mystical Teuton had come down
from his black Boreal forests and the Celt remembered strange sacrifices in
Druidic groves, it assumed a terrible intensity and convincing seriousness
of atmosphere which doubled the force of its half-told, half-hinted hor-
rors” (24).
This contrast suggests the close kinship between “atmosphere” and
what would have been called, by the Gothic writers of the previous two
centuries, the sublime, a kinship this volume’s first chapter develops in
detail. Indeed, Lovecraft’s contrast re-stages the Burkean distinction
between powerful, masculine sublimity and delicate, feminine beauty. It
aligns the former with the Western cultural imagination, with its Teutonic
seriousness, and the latter with its Oriental counterpart, sheer, sprightly,
and not so serious. This is a ubiquitous trope of late nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century Orientalism, and hardly unique to Lovecraft. Yet here it
reveals a hierarchy of literary form, establishing that the seriousness, inten-
sity, and atmosphere of the “true” weird, with its cosmic orientation, ele-
vates it above the merely decorative diversions of “sheer phantasy.”
It also suggests the belief in racialized cultural incompatibility that leads
to Lovecraft’s elsewhere-stated desire to “get rid of the non-English
hordes whose heritages and deepest instincts clash so disastrously with”
those of white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant Americans—especially the more
serious and sensitive among them.14
The criterion of atmosphere becomes in this and related passages a
means of suggesting the superiority of the “mystical Teuton” in the realm
of literary supernaturalism. Passed over quietly by most of the plaudits
above, this aspect of SHL must be reckoned with by writers and scholars
who admit the importance of Lovecraft’s critical legacy. The need to do so
is especially important in light of how Lovecraft’s critical legacy continues
to influence the course and conception of horror, weird, and supernatural
fiction in the first decades of the twenty-first century.
Ann and Jeff VanderMeer do so, at least to a degree, in the introduc-
tion to their epic compendium The Weird (2011). Important for its inter-
national scope and commitment to going beyond the work of Lovecraft
and the Anglo-American pulp tradition, The Weird is nevertheless
grounded in SHL’s definition of weird fiction:
6 S. MORELAND
A “weird tale,” as defined by H. P. Lovecraft in his nonfiction writings and

given early sanctuary within the pages of magazines like Weird Tales (est.
1923) is a story that has a supernatural element but does not fall into the
category of traditional ghost story or Gothic tale, both popular in the 1800s.
As Lovecraft wrote in 1927, the weird tale “has something more than secret
murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains.” Instead, it repre-
sents the pursuit of some indefinable and perhaps maddeningly unreachable
understanding of the world beyond the mundane—a “certain atmosphere of
breathless and unexplainable dread” or “malign and particular suspension or
defeat of … fixed laws of Nature”—through fiction that comes from the
more unsettling, shadowy side of the fantastical tradition.15
This suggests the difficulty, or perhaps impossibility, of working with the

weird as a historically informed mode of expression without wrestling with
Lovecraft’s critical legacy. An awareness of this is evident in the
VanderMeer’s claim that “the Weird is the story of the refinement (and
destabilization) of supernatural fiction within an established framework,”
a framework that SHL did much to establish. However, they also oppose
the Weird to this (or to any) singular tradition: it involves “the welcome
contamination of that fiction by the influence of other traditions.”16 The
phrase “welcome contamination” is a quiet critical rejoinder to SHL’s cul-
tural politics of racial exclusivity.
Despite the widespread acknowledgment of SHL’s importance, and the
problems its influence poses, the essay has not received much in the way of
sustained critical attention. In S. T. Joshi’s words, scholars of both Lovecraft
and weird fiction broadly “have not made as full use” of Lovecraft’s essay
as they could.17 The chapters in this volume begin to rectify this, variously
deepening and broadening the critical dialogue surrounding SHL by
examining its achievements, limitations, and influences. They do so using
a variety of conceptual and methodological approaches and, in some cases,
by pushing SHL’s critical concepts in directions Lovecraft could not have
foreseen and would not have approved.
The essays in the first section, “‘The Oldest and Strongest Emotion’:
The Psychology and Philosophy of Horror” explore SHL’s conceptions of
fear, horror, and the cosmic. My chapter, “The Birth of Cosmic Horror
from the S(ub)lime of Lucretius,” turns to the vexed question of cosmic
horror’s relationship with the sublime. Focusing on the adjective “cos-
mic,” I argue that the classical materialist poetics of first-century BCE
Roman poet Lucretius are a major source for Lovecraft’s modernist muta-
tion of the sublime into SHL’s cosmic horror and his later ideal of a “non-
supernatural cosmic art.” Mathias Clasen turns to evolutionary psychology
to examine SHL’s achievement with “The Evolution of Horror: A
Neo-Lovecraftian Poetics.” Clasen analyzes SHL’s attempt to produce a
naturalistic account of both the emotion of horror and the seductive
appeal of supernatural horror fiction, demonstrating that many of
Lovecraft’s claims for the psychobiological basis of horror are eminently
compatible with contemporary social scientific models of human nature
and culture. Sharon Packer’s chapter, “Ansky’s The Dybbuk, Freud’s
Future of an Illusion, Watson’s Little Albert and Supernatural Horror in
Literature,” engages with the history of psychology, considering the influ-
ence of Freudian psychoanalysis and the behaviorist experiments of John
B. Watson on Lovecraft’s conception of fear and horror. Packer also criti-
cally considers Lovecraft’s appreciation for aspects of Jewish mystical lit-
erature, and particularly SHL’s praise of Ansky’s The Dybbuk, despite his
infamously anti-Semitic views. Rounding out this section while anticipat-
ing the concern of the essays in the second is Alissa Burger’s “Gazing
Upon ‘The Daemons of Unplumbed Space’ with H.P. Lovecraft and
Stephen King: Theorizing Horror and Cosmic Terror.” Burger looks back
on Lovecraft’s concept of cosmic horror and its relationship to hierarchies
of affect through its reception and adaptation by the most popular living
writer of supernatural horror, Stephen King. King’s Danse Macabre builds
on Lovecraft, while casting a long shadow of its own over late twentieth-
and early twenty-first-century horror and supernatural fiction, and Burger
charts Lovecraft’s critical influence not only in a number of King’s stories,
but also in their cinematic adaptations.
The essays in the second section, “‘A Literature of Cosmic Fear’:
Lovecraft, Criticism and Literary History,” focus on SHL’s historical and
critical claims. Helen Marshall moves back beyond the eighteenth-century
Gothic, examining SHL’s elliptical treatment of horror in the Medieval
period. Despite Lovecraft’s evident disdain for and relative ignorance of
the culture of the late Middle Ages, Marshall finds his essay useful for re-
framing the penitential poem The Prick of Conscience as an early example
of the “literature of cosmic fear.” Vivian Ralickas turns to the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries, via Lovecraft’s interest in the philosophical and
aesthetic movement of Dandyism. Examining Lovecraft’s relationship
with Epicureanism and Dandyism as modes of aestheticized, elitistic mas-
culinity, Ralickas provides a detailed account of how these movements
framed SHL’s engagement with writers including Baudelaire, Gauthier,
8 S. MORELAND
and Wilde. S. T. Joshi’s “Lovecraft and the Titans: A Critical Legacy”

focuses on Lovecraft’s prescience as literary critic, re-examining his assess-
ment of five of the early twentieth century’s most important writers of
weird fiction, M. R. James, Lord Dunsany, Algernon Blackwood, Arthur
Machen, and Walter de la Mare. Joshi closely traces Lovecraft’s shifting
critical views of these writers, focusing particularly on how his developing
conception of cosmicism affected his estimation of their respective achieve-
ments. John Glover’s “Reception Claims in Supernatural Horror in
Literature and the Course of Weird Fiction” provides a detailed analysis of
both Lovecraft’s own critical writings and those of his early champions,
many of whom were also his epistolary interlocutors and friends. Glover
concludes by examining Lovecraft’s relationship with the shifting defini-
tions of “horror” and “weird” fiction over the last quarter century, open-
ing the field that will be further explored by the essays in the third and
final section.
The essays in “‘The True Weird’: (Re)defining the Weird” work with
and through SHL’s often nebulous and even contradictory conception of
the weird in a variety of ways. Returning to some of the concerns raised by
the essays in the first section, but from a very different perspective, Michael
Cisco’s “Bizarre Epistemology, Bizarre Subject: A Definition of Weird
Fiction” reads Lovecraft’s philosophy of horror in resistant and creative
ways via Kant, Nietzsche, Bergson, and Deleuze. Cisco uses SHL and
related writings as philosophical instruments in order to work out an origi-
nal, experiential theory of the bizarre. With “Women, Sex and the
Dismorphmythic: Lovecraft, Carter, Kiernan and Beyond,” Gina Wisker
provides both a feminist critique of Lovecraft’s essay and an examination
of how a number of important contemporary women writers of weird fic-
tion have adapted and transformed elements of Lovecraft’s writings. To
this end, she examines short fiction by Angela Carter, Caitlín R. Kiernan,
and a number of contemporary writers whose work is featured in Silvia
Moreno-Garcia and Paula R. Stiles’s groundbreaking anthology She Walks
in Shadows (2015, released in the US as Cthulhu’s Daughters.)
Brian R. Hauser turns to Lovecraft’s influence and critical relevance for
film studies with “Weird Cinema and the Aesthetics of Dread.” Hauser
explores the applicability of the adjective “Lovecraftian” to a number of
contemporary films, while examining the reflections these films offer of
Lovecraft’s aesthetic and critical principles, by drawing on contemporary
studies including Mark Fisher’s The Weird and the Eerie (2016.) Finally,
Brian Johnson’s chapter, “Paranoia, Panic, and the Queer Weird,” brings
this volume full circle with a return to the psychology of horror via a his-
toricized account of Lovecraft’s Freudian intertexts, which become part of
a wide-ranging examination of the relationship between the shifting
connotations of the words “queer” and “weird” through the twentieth
century. Johnson’s penetrating analysis of the ways homophobia shaped
Lovecraft’s cultural context provides a deeper understanding not just of
his writings, but also his troubling exemplarity in twentieth-century sexual
politics.
Notes
1. Readers interested in a more detailed account of the essay’s biographical
context and publication history should consult S.T. Joshi’s “Introduction”
to The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature (New York:
Hippocampus Press, 2000), 9–20.
2. Stephen King, Danse Macabre (New York: Berkeley Books, 1983).
3. David G. Hartwell, The Dark Descent (New York: Tor Books, 1987), 5.
4. For a cogent discussion of the significance of this conception, its roots in
Lovecraft’s reading of Poe, and its evolution in his later critical writings,
see S.T. Joshi, “Poe, Lovecraft and the Revolution in Weird Fiction,”
(paper presented at the Ninth Annual Commemoration Program of the
Poe Society, October 7, 2012), http://www.eapoe.org/papers/psblctrs/
pl20121.html
5. Hartwell, The Dark Descent, 85.
6. James Ursini and Alain Silver, More Things than Are Dreamt of: Masterpieces
of Supernatural Horror (Limelight, 1994), 61.
7. S.T. Joshi, “Preface,” The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature,
edited by S.T. Joshi (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2000), 7.
8. Lovecraft, Selected Letters II, 160.
11. Touponce, 59.
13. H.P. Lovecraft, Selected Letters Volume II (Sauk City: Arkham House,
1971), 290.
15. Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, “Introduction,” The Weird (New York: Tor
Books, 2011), xv.
16. The Weird, xvi.
17. S.T. Joshi, “Preface,” The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature,
edited by S.T. Joshi (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2000), 7.
SECTION I
“The Oldest and Strongest Emotion”:

The Psychology of Cosmic Horror
CHAPTER 2
The Birth of Cosmic Horror

from the S(ub)lime of Lucretius
Sean Moreland
Cosmic Horror: A Terrible Sublime

…vapour chill
The ascendance gains when fear the frame pervades,
And ruthless HORROR, shivering every limb …
Lucretius1
In an exchange with scholar Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, China Miéville

locates Lovecraft within a “visionary and ecstatic tradition,” part of a
“break” in that tradition contemporaneous with the First World War.
This break is the shattering of representation that gave rise to modernist
literature, “a kind of terrible, terrible sublime.”2 This chapter contrasts
what Supernatural Horror in Literature (SHL) calls cosmic horror with
earlier uses of the term, examining the pre-modern aesthetic sources
Lovecraft synthesized with early twentieth-century anxieties in expressing
this terrible sublime. Lovecraft identified with the first-century BCE
Roman poet Lucretius,3 whose epic poem De Rerum Natura (DRN) was
crucial to his subversion of the theological and sentimental humanist
S. Moreland (*)
University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON, Canada

14 S. MORELAND
foundations of the Enlightenment, Romantic, and Victorian discourse on

the sublime. Lovecraft read the Roman writer through his own racialized
sexual and political anxieties in ways that continue to shape modern weird
and horror fiction and contemporary philosophical appropriations of his
writings alike.
Ghosts and Goulds: Cosmic Horror

Before Lovecraft
Can I not fling this horror off me again,
Seeing with how great ease Nature can smile,
Balmier and nobler from her bath of storm,
At random ravage?
Tennyson, “Lucretius”
As Brian Stableford notes, “the notion of ‘cosmic horror’ is closely associ-

ated with Lovecraft.”4 However, although Lovecraft’s writing, and SHL in
particular, popularized and re-defined cosmic horror, which would become
almost exclusively associated with him by the late twentieth century,
Lovecraft did not invent the phrase, already in circulation nearly a decade
before his birth, nor was he the first to conceive of the affective concept it
described. Horror writer Thomas Ligotti looks back to the writings of
French scientist and Christian philosopher Blaise Pascal for an early mod-
ern, and contrapuntal, conception. Pascal
wrote of his a sense of being ‘engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces

whereof I know nothing, and which know nothing of me; I am terrified.
The eternal silence of these infinite spaces fills me with dread’ (Pensées,
1670). Pascal’s is not an unnatural reaction for those phobic to infinite
spaces that know nothing of them.5
The Enlightenment saw a proliferation of writings about the affective

intensity evoked by the scalar abysses of the world viewed through the
complementary lenses of the microscope and telescope. Consider this pas-
sage from The Book of Nature, a collection of lectures by British physician,
philosopher, natural theologian, and the Romantic period’s most influen-
tial translator of Lucretius, John Mason Good:
THE BIRTH OF COSMIC HORROR FROM THE S(UB)LIME OF LUCRETIUS 15
What is the aggregate opinion, or the aggregate importance of the whole

human race! We call our selves lords of the visible creation: nor ought we at
any time, with affected abjection, to degrade or despise the high gift of a
rational and immortal existence.—Yet, what is the visible creation? By whom
peopled? And where are its entrances and outgoings? Turn wherever we will,
we are equally confounded and overpowered: the little and the great alike
are beyond our comprehension. If we take the microscope, it unfolds to us
[…] living beings, probably endowed with as complex and perfect a struc-
ture as the whale or the elephant, so minute that a million millions of them
do not occupy a bulk larger than a common grain of sand. If we exchange
the microscope for the telescope, we behold man himself reduced to a com-
parative scale of almost infinitely smaller dimension, fixed to a minute planet
that is scarcely perceptible throughout the vast extent of the solar system;
while this system itself forms but an insensible point in the multitudinous
marshallings of groups of worlds upon groups of worlds, above, below, and
on every side of us, that spread through all the immensity of space.6
Published in 1826, Good’s description of cosmicism resembles Lovecraft’s

a century later, but for its emphasis on “creation,” and the concluding
sentence this word anticipates: “and in sublime, though silent harmony
declare the glory of God, and show forth his handy work.”7 Good spent
much of his intellectual life desperately attempting to reconcile Christianity
with both Lucretius’s atomic materialist vision and that emerging with
nineteenth-century scientific developments. Throughout his writings, the
word “sublime” reminds readers of the presence of a divine creator, and
the unique relationship this creator has with humanity. His tendentious
translation of Lucretius interjects the word sublime frequently in order to
reinstate the divine significance of the human figure, in effect subverting
the Roman poet’s depiction of humanity as merely one among countless
species of perishable material phenomena, emerging via a procession of
undirected collisions at the atomic level.
Good’s description is but one dramatic example of the “turn” charac-
terizing most accounts of the sublime from the early Enlightenment
through the late Victorian era. In this turn, horror, a paralyzing affect
marked by a freezing sensation, one often occasioned by the vastness and
unknowability of the universe, is melted into a sensation of awesome ele-
vation, usually by a theistic intimation of our privileged position within
that universe. It is within this discourse of affective theology that “cosmic
horror” existed prior to Lovecraft.
16 S. MORELAND
The earliest use I’ve found of the phrase itself is part of a journalistic
description of the period leading up to the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883:
“We could feel that some cosmic horror was impending long before the
catastrophe took place, and I fancy that other sensations of a like nature
are in store. We hear from one part of Asia of atmospheric phenomena
which disturb numerous and delicate people.”8 From its first recorded
appearance, nearly a half-century before Lovecraft adapted it, the term
“cosmic horror” was associated with an atmosphere, in the most literal
sense, one that “delicate” people were especially responsive to, and one
involving a disturbing intimation of threatening immensity. This usage
derives from the idea of “cosmic emotion” developed by English mathe-
matician and philosopher, William Kingdon Clifford, who in turn derived
it from English utilitarian philosopher, Henry Sidgwick.9 Clifford defines
what he means by the term in his 1877 essay, “The Cosmic Emotion”:
By a cosmic emotion—the phrase is Mr. Henry Sidgwick’s—I mean an emo-

tion which is felt in regard to the universe or sum of things, viewed as a
cosmos or order. There are two kinds of cosmic emotion—one having refer-
ence to the Macrocosm or universe surrounding and containing us, the
other relating to the Microcosm or universe of our own souls. When we try
to put together the most general conceptions that we can form about the
great aggregate of events that are always going on, to strike a sort of balance
among the feelings which these events produce in us, and to add to these the
feeling of vastness associated with an attempt to represent the whole of exis-
tence, then we experience a cosmic emotion of the first kind. It may have the
character of awe, veneration, resignation, submission; or it may be an over-
powering stimulus to action.10
Clifford points out the admirable synthesis of these two forms in a sen-
tence by Immanuel Kant, which has been “perfectly translated by Lord
Houghton”:
The two things I contemplate with ceaseless awe:

The stars of heaven, and man’s sense of law.11
Clifford’s cosmic emotion is a version of the Kantian sublime influenced

by Herbert Spencer’s progressivist evolutionary views. Clifford calls it
“the cosmic emotion,” rather than specifying what emotion it is, because
“the character of the emotion with which men contemplate the world, the
temper in which they stand in the presence of the immensities and the
eternities, must depend first of all on what they think the world is.”12 In
other words, whether the cosmic emotion is awe or terror depends on
how “the world,” reality, is understood, an understanding that changes
drastically with historical and cultural context and the development of sci-
entific knowledge: “Whatever conception, then, we can form of the exter-
nal cosmos must be regarded as only provisional and not final, as waiting
revision when we shall have pushed the bounds of our knowledge further
away in time and space.”13 Clifford’s cosmic emotion influenced William
James, whose The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) presents it as a
natural legitimation of religious belief. Ligotti notes the contrast between
James and Lovecraft in this regard: “In both his creative writings and his
letters, Lovecraft’s expression of the feelings James describes form an
exception to the philosopher-psychologist’s argument, since Lovecraft
experienced such cosmic wonder in the absence of religious belief.”14
Clifford’s ambiguous “cosmic emotion” was resolved by American lexi-
cographer, physician, and natural theologian George M. Gould into “cos-
mic horror.” Gould’s formulation was popular in medical, philosophical,
and theological literature from the mid-1890s through to about 1910,
first occurring in 1893: “I have learned that many another sensitive
despairing soul, in the face of the glib creeds and the loneliness of subjec-
tivity, has also and often felt the same clutching spasm of cosmic horror,
the very heart of life stifled and stilled with an infinite fear and sense of
lostness.”15 Gould continued to refer to cosmic horror in his later writ-
ings, associating it with a supposed pathological inability to recognize
divinity in nature. His 1904 essay “The Infinite Presence” states: “Only
for a short instant, at best, will most persons consent to look open-eyed at
any clear image of fate or of infinity,” since “the freezing of the heart that
follows, the appalling shudder at the dread contemplation of infinity,
which may be called cosmic horror, is more than can be endured. If those
stars are absolutely and positively infinite, then there is no up or down,
and they knew no beginning, will have no ending. With any such staring
gorgon of fatalism the surcharged attention is shaken.”16
However, Gould asks, “Why may not this cosmic horror be turned to
cosmic pleasure? It is at best not bravery or athletic prowess, and at worst
it is a psychic want of equilibrium, a morbid metaphysics.”17 Gould con-
cludes that those who exercise a moral intuition of the infinite experience
cosmic horror as the first stage on a journey to ecstatic elevation: “The
horror is from disuse of the innate power, and the sublimest pleasure may
be found in excursions into the infinite.”18 For Gould, cosmic horror is
18 S. MORELAND
only a base material that “man’s sense of law” sublimates by affective

alchemy into an elevated “ceaseless awe,” the inability to reach such
“sublime pleasure” he equates with “a morbid metaphysics.” This is a
medico-theological recapitulation of the Kantian sublime that Lovecraft
turns on its head.
A Morbid Metaphysics: Lovecraftian Cosmic Horror

I have encountered no evidence that Lovecraft had firsthand knowledge of
Gould’s writings, which he would have scorned. Yet Lovecraft’s concep-
tion of cosmic horror can be best understood in contrast to Gould’s.
Where Gould’s cosmic horror exemplifies what Miéville calls “the nos-
trums of a kind of late Victorian bourgeois culture,” Lovecraft’s concep-
tion becomes, also in Miéville’s words, “the most pure and vivid expression
of that moment” when such nostrums become “unsustainable.”19
While the primary inspirations of Lovecraft’s cosmic horror are works
of supernatural literature, including those by Poe, Arthur Machen,
Algernon Blackwood, and William Hope Hodgson, their work is demon-
strably shaped by Romantic and Victorian natural theology. Good’s Book
of Nature was an important source for Poe’s cosmic tales and philo-
sophical ruminations. SHL places Hodgson “perhaps second only to
Algernon Blackwood in his serious treatment of unreality,” with House
on the Borderland called “perhaps the greatest” of his works (59; see
S. T. Joshi’s chapter for an account of the evolution of Lovecraft’s cos-
micism as criterion). This novel describes an affect that as clearly echoes
Addison’s account of the sublime (described below) as it anticipates
Lovecraft’s cosmic horror:
There was no need to be afraid of the creature; the bars were strong, and
there was little danger of its being able to move them. And then, suddenly,
in spite of the knowledge that the brute could not reach to harm me, I had
a return of the horrible sensation of fear, that had assailed me on that night,
a week previously. It was the same feeling of helpless, shuddering fright.
The most direct and detailed literary source of SHL’s conception of cos-
mic horror is Blackwood’s “The Willows,” described as the “foremost” of
his fictions for the “impression of lasting poignancy” it evokes (66.) “The
Willows” details “a singular emotion” closely related to, but distinct
from, natural sublimity, in which “delight of the wild beauty” mingles

with “a curious feeling of disquietude, almost of alarm” that “lay deeper
far than the emotions of awe or wonder,” and “had to do with my realiza-
tion of our utter insignificance before this unrestrained power of the ele-
ments about me.”20 The only difference between this description and
Gould’s cosmic horror is that Blackwood’s affect involves a simultaneous
commingling of horror and awe, rather than the resolution of the former
into the latter by a sublime turn. Lovecraft consistently follows Blackwood
in presenting cosmic horror as a “sense of awe” “touched somewhere by
vague terror.”21
The simultaneous fusion of Lovecraft’s version of cosmic horror and
the sequential fission of Gould’s are reflected in their respective diction.
Where Gould is consistent in using the phrase “cosmic horror” through-
out his writings, Lovecraft’s phrasing varies widely. In SHL alone, Lovecraft
refers, seemingly interchangeably, to “cosmic panic,” “cosmic terror,”
“cosmic horror,” and “cosmic fear.”22 As Stableford notes, “Lovecraft’s
fascination with the adjective ‘cosmic’ is clearly evident” in SHL, but the
adjective is “used there in a sense that is rather different from the connota-
tions eventually acquired by ‘cosmic horror.’”23 Like Clifford’s deliber-
ately unspecified “cosmic emotion,” SHL’s recurring use of “cosmic”
modifies a variety of emotions, a vacillation more revealing than termino-
logical consistency could be. These verbal compounds serve three closely
related functions in Lovecraft’s writings, and especially in SHL.
First, they distinguish between Lovecraft’s use of “cosmic” and the tra-
ditional teleological and providential connotations cosmos carried over
from Greek philosophy. Lovecraft’s compounds move from the lofty or
mystical connotations of “cosmic” in its Stoic or neo-Platonic uses to what
he called “cosmic indifferentism.” This philosophy is grounded, as
S.T. Joshi explains, in
mechanistic materialism. The term postulates two ontological hypotheses:

1) the universe is a “mechanism” governed by fixed laws (although these
may not all be known to human beings) where all entity is inextricably con-
nected causally; there can be no such thing as chance (hence no free will but
instead an absolute determinism), since every incident is the inevitable out-
come of countless ancillary and contributory events reaching back into
infinity; 2) all entity is material, and there can be no other essence, whether
it be “soul” or “spirit” or any other non-material substance.24
20 S. MORELAND
For Lovecraft, the cosmic follows a dynamics of descent, back to the body
and its physiological states. Mathias Clasen notes that Lovecraft was
among the first theorists of horror to consistently apply “a natural basis for
the appeal of horror stories” by recognizing that “people are biologically
susceptible to superstitious fear.”25 The accuracy of this recognition is
explored in more detail by Clasen’s chapter.
Second, Lovecraft’s phrasal compounds differentiate between the emo-
tion they signify and its “mere” physiological equivalent, a distinction
more fully explored by Michael Cisco’s chapter. The latter emotions are
the provenance of the “externally similar but psychologically widely differ-
ent” literature of “mere physical fear and the mundanely gruesome,” and
this is not SHL’s domain (22). Where “fear” is a simple, instinctive response
to a perceived threat, “cosmic” suggests a component of cognitive disrup-
tion, an epistemic shock, the intrusion of “the unknown.”
Third, Lovecraft’s insistent vacillation between terror, horror, panic,
dread and fear ambiguates these emotions, unsettling the hierarchized dif-
ferentiation of terror from horror first popularized by Gothic novelist Ann
Radcliffe, building on philosopher Edmund Burke, toward the end of the
eighteenth century. Radcliffe claimed that horror paralyzed and froze the
faculties, a description echoed by Gould’s account of cosmic horror a cen-
tury later. Terror, on the other hand, stimulated the imagination, awak-
ened the senses, and involved the sublime. This aspect of Radcliffe’s
distinction anticipated Kant’s account of the sublimation of terror via the
intuition of moral reason, an account reframed by Gould’s formulation,
one that has maintained a centuries-long influence. It is, for example,
echoed by Stephen King’s Danse Macabre (1981), as Alissa Burger’s chap-
ter details. Yet the collapse of Radcliffe’s Burkean hierarchy, part of the
rhetorical work done by SHL’s lexical transitions, was a crucial part of
Lovecraft’s break from his Romantic and Victorian precursors.
“To Resuscitate the Dead Art”: Howard

Lovecraft, Re-animator!
For three years, out of key with his time,
He strove to resuscitate the dead art
Of poetry; to maintain “the sublime”
In the old sense. Wrong from the start—
Ezra Pound, “Hugh Selwyn Mauberly” (1920)
On first glance, Miéville’s characterization of Lovecraft’s work as “mod-

ernist” in its manifestation of a “terrible sublime” associated with the cul-
tural trauma of the First World War seems to contradict both Lovecraft’s
hostility toward modernist poetics and his apparent eschewal of “the sub-
lime,” a term rarely employed in his writings. However, Norman
R. Gayford’s “The Artist as Antaeus” and, more recently, Gerry Carlin and
Nicola Allen’s “Slime and Western Man: H. P. Lovecraft in the Time of
Modernism” demonstrate that Lovecraft’s soi-disant anti-modernism is
rather a committed argumentative dialogue with it. In Carlin and Allen’s
words, Lovecraft “often shares the central concerns of the writers from
which he ostensibly sought to distance himself.”26 Gayford emphasizes
that Lovecraft’s suspicion for modernist poetics stems from his absolute
separation of “art and scientific philosophy,” and his conviction that no
“artistic pattern can represent reality.” Since the nature of the universe,
according to Lovecraft, is an “infinite chaos where the very conception of
a value is a local and transient accident,” poetic attempts to formalize the
chaotic conditions of physical and social reality in the early twentieth cen-
tury are profoundly misguided, making modernist literary techniques such
as those that inform Eliot’s “The Waste Land” “very well meant, but quite
ironically futile.”27
The aesthetics of the Romantic sublime were dead, shattered, it could
fairly be said, by the First World War. The opening stanza of Ezra Pound’s
autobiographical poem, above, emphasizes the abdication of “the sub-
lime” shared by Lovecraft, a term SHL replaces with its procession of
cosmic compounds. While Lovecraft was deeply hostile to the modernist
poetics of Pound and Eliot, he nevertheless shared their hatred of the
parochial sentimentality of Romanticism:
The one form of literary appeal which I consider absolutely unsound,

charlatanic, & valueless—frivolous, insincere, irrelevant & meaningless—is
that mode of handling human events & values & motivations known as
romanticism. Dumas, Scott, Stevenson—my gawd!28
So, like Pound and Eliot, Lovecraft returned to the pre-Romantic past to
find a way through the rags and bones, rot and fossils of “the sublime” to
the unsettling intensity it had once signified.
SHL’s insistence on the “essential impersonality” of the artist, grounded
in its praise for Poe, is part of its rejection of Romantic sentimentality.
Eliot shares Lovecraft’s disdain for personalistic moralism, if not his high
22 S. MORELAND
estimation of Poe. “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919) claims

that true art is necessarily “a continual extinction of personality,”29 empha-
sizing “how completely any semi-ethical criterion of ‘sublimity’ misses the
mark.”30 This signals Eliot’s rejection of Burkean and Kantian theories of
the sublime, as well as Matthew Arnold’s view that the sublime effects of
great poetry could function as a form of, or substitute for, religious ven-
eration, a view the atheistic Lovecraft and the piously Anglo-Catholic
Eliot abhorred for different reasons.
Eliot contrasts the “structural emotion” or “dominant tone” of a liter-
ary work with the more “superficial emotions” or “floating feelings” of
the writer and readers that circulate around it. Eliot’s “depersonalization”
of poetry and emotion is close kin to Lovecraft’s cosmicization of super-
natural fiction, because, despite Eliot’s deliberate self-distancing from Poe
at this stage in his career, his conception of “structural emotion” owes as
much to Poe’s “Unity of Effect” as Lovecraft’s conception of “atmo-
sphere” does. Both writers oppose this “structural emotion” to “mere”
personal emotion, portraying it instead as profoundly transpersonal, wir-
ing the individual in to a (also in both cases racialized) culture stream.
Both use this emotion, a sublimity opposed to the sublime, to refigure
their respective literary traditions.
That Lovecraft’s cosmic horror is closely related to sublimity is not a
new observation. Stableford’s “The Cosmic Horror” admirably glosses
this relationship, charting the outgrowth of cosmic horror from the sub-
lime of Gothic and Romantic literature, while tracing the drift of Lovecraft’s
use of the term “cosmic” away from the 1927 version of SHL, and simul-
taneously away from the sublime of Gothic romance. While others have
delved into this vexed relationship in more detail, the vast and often con-
tradictory nature of the discourse on the sublime makes it difficult to do
so without subordinating sublimity to a particular philosophical account
of the sublime. Such a subordination informs Alex Houstoun’s “Lovecraft
and the Sublime: A Reinterpretation” and in a more nuanced way Vivian
Ralickas’s “Cosmic horror and the question of the sublime in Lovecraft.”31
Both Houstoun and Ralickas interrogate and reject earlier critical attempts
to reconcile cosmic horror with the Burkean or Kantian sublime.32
Ralickas’s more ambitious essay turns from Burke and Kant to psychoana-
lytic theory, elaborating cosmic horror via Kristeva’s notion of abjection to
provide a useful “roadmap for future study of Lovecraftian aesthetics.”33 It
is, however, a roadmap on which some crucial regions remain obscure.
Ralickas writes, “In its ironic subversion of sublimity, cosmic horror not
only denies the subject a safe vantage point from which to witness the spec-
tacle in question, but also converts the sublime turn into a dynamics of
descent.”34 Contrary to the Burkean or Kantian sublime, which assert “the
centrality of the human subject, the poetics particular to cosmic horror
relegates it to the sidelines by reversing the order of priority that sublimity
establishes between the subject and its objects, privileging the latter over
the former.”35 Ralickas’s account of sublimity reduces it to the conceptions
of the sublime proposed by Burke and Kant; Vrasidas Karalis’s
“Disambiguating the Sublime and the Historicity of the Concept” indicates
the problems with subordinating sublimity to a particular historical itera-
tion, and conversely those inherent in defining sublimity without reference
to a particular cultural or historical context. Karalis argues that attempts to
re-figure (or even re-name) sublimity always accompany “a dominant crisis
of representation,” in which “the sublime emerges as a category of classifi-
cation intended to name the unknowability of the emerging order.”
Sublimity, therefore, in its numerous forms and modes, is a historically
and culturally variable, highly provisional means of representing an aes-
thetic experience beyond the scope of dominant modes of representation.
This means there are “various forms of sublime according to the spatial
and temporal potentialities of each culture.”36 While the aesthetic criteria
for sublimity vary widely across historical and cultural contexts, what
unites them is that each embodies a “historically defined category of expe-
riencing and interpreting objective realities.” This occurs, Karalis claims,
“when conceptual paradigms collide with each other in periods of extreme
cultural transition and re-orientation. During such historical periods of
transition, an existing order of things and values is gradually undermined,
dislocated, and transformed by different forms of perception and diverse
patterns of ordering experience.”37
Karalis’s conception supports Miéville’s characterization of the shatter-
ing of representational modes occurring contemporaneously with the First
World War as a “terrible sublime.” It also illuminates the semantic chasm
opened by Ralickas’s painstaking distinctions between cosmic horror and
the Burkean/Kantian modes of the sublime, enabling a recognition of
Lovecraft’s cosmic horror as a particular, historically specific expression of
the “mental category” of sublimity, a radical mutation of what Victorian
writers like Gould or Arnold would have recognized as sublime. However,
Lovecraft’s cosmic horror, while a product of its own early twentieth-century
context, also draws heavily on the sublimes of earlier historical moments.
24 S. MORELAND
“We Survey a Dead Monster”: Lovecraft, Addison,

and the Lucretian Sublime
Joseph Addison not only served Lovecraft as a model prose stylist, but
also, as J. D. Worthington emphasizes, “had a broader influence” than
“mere style or manner,” deeply influencing his “views of life and the
arts.”38 The “Pleasures of the Imagination” essays, known to and beloved
by Lovecraft from an early age, contain some of Addison’s most cogent
meditations on the sublime. Addison claims the sublime “does not arise so
properly from the description of what is terrible, as from the reflection we
make on our selves at the time of reading it.”39 Even more apropos of
Lovecraft is Addison’s later statement that “the more frightful appear-
ance” fearsome and awful entities display, “the greater is the pleasure we
receive from the sense of our own safety. In short, we look upon the ter-
rors of a description, with the same curiosity and satisfaction that we sur-
vey a dead monster.”40 This description is germinal for Lovecraft: the
ancient monster, seemingly dead, whose return is described in a language
characterized by intensity and verbal excess, juxtaposed with elision and
deferral, all poetic devices associated with the sublime. Many of Addison’s
meditations on sublimity were occasioned by his interest in astronomy:
If we rise yet higher, and consider the fixt Stars as so many vast Oceans of
Flame, that are each of them attended with a different Sett of Planets, and
still discover new Firmaments and new lights, that are sunk farther in those
unfathomable Depths of Ether, so as not to be seen by the strongest of our
Telescopes, we are lost in such a labyrinth of Suns and Worlds, and are con-
founded with the Immensity and Magnificence of Nature.41
In Anne Janowitz’s words, “Eye, telescope, and imagination can just

about totalise the sweep from our solar system to the expanse of stars
outside it, but when the mind considers the immensity of the universe, it
becomes unmoored, so that ‘we are lost’ and ‘confounded,’” “a com-
mon feature of the trope” of cosmic sublimity.42 The ambivalence of
Addison’s reaction to such cosmic vistas, fusing enthusiastic elevation
with loss and confusion, is foundational not only for Burke’s A
Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and
Beautiful Enquiry (1757), but for Kant’s later theorizations of the sub-
lime, first in his Observations (1764) and later in the Critique of Judgment
(1790). The latter closely echoes Addison, stating that “sublimity is not
contained in anything in nature, but only in our mind, insofar as we can
become conscious of being superior to nature within us and thus also to
nature outside us.”43 While Kant grounds the theological ruminations of
Good and Gould, Lovecraft eschews them in returning to Addison, and
beyond Addison, to Lucretius.
Pseudo-Longinus’s first-century CE Peri Hypsos has long been
regarded as the primary source of sublime aesthetics in the early modern
world. Karalis explains, “Longinus paved the way for medieval art and
the Christian sublime as expressed by Gothic architecture, twelfth-cen-
tury Byzantine mosaics, and frescoes.”44 Central to the Longinian sub-
lime is a focus on sublime objects or expressions that serve as a means of
subjective elevation, an ekstasis understood as divine. As its influence
over religious iconography and theological rhetoric attests, the
Longinian sublime is, in Glenn Most’s words, “fundamentally a form of
theodicy, justifying human suffering by appeal to the superior logic of
divine wisdom.”45
The Longinian mode is especially evident in the writings of Addison’s
older contemporary, English dramatist and critic John Dennis. Dennis
sought to explain the role of sublime terror in poetry in his 1704 essay
“Grounds of Criticism in Poetry.” Echoing Longinus, Dennis claims no
passion is more “capable of giving a great spirit to poetry” than the “enthu-
siastic terror” of the sublime.46 Dennis iterates notable objects of such
terror: “gods, demons, hell, spirits and souls of men, miracles, prodigies,
enchantments, witchcraft, thunder, tempests, raging seas, inundations,
torrents, earthquakes, volcanoes, monsters, serpents, lions, tigers, fire, war,
pestilence, famine,” before concluding that “of these ideas none are so ter-
rible as those which show the wrath and vengeance of an angry god.”47
The balance between subject and object for Dennis is clear: the object
is privileged, not in itself, but because it leads the subject to a recognition
of divine omnipotence. This brief flashback into the early modern dis-
course on the sublime reveals that Lovecraft’s cosmic horror, privileging
object over subject and focusing on the latter’s inevitable extirpation by
the former, marks less an innovation than a return to older conceptions of
the sublime. It is a retrogressive mutation.
This return to the object informs Lovecraft’s twenty-first-century adop-
tion as a kind of prophet by philosophical paradigms including speculative
realism and object-oriented ontology, which variously attempt to break
26 S. MORELAND
out of the subjective double bind imposed by Kantian philosophy, with its
foreclosure of metaphysical speculation and bracketing of the Ding-an-
Sich. However, the return of the object in Lovecraft’s cosmic horror is
hardly the return of the Longinian sublime, despite Longinus’s predomi-
nance in modern discussions. Glenn Most notes the “restrictive identifica-
tion of the sublime” with Longinus, which “neglects a theoretically and
historically crucial alternative to the Longinian conception.”48 This alter-
native is the atomic sublime of DRN, a major inspiration for both ancient
and early modern accounts of sublimity.49
The Longinian and Lucretian sublime share much in common, includ-
ing probable textual sources. As David Norbrook explains,
Lucretius’s sublime has enough parallels with Longinus to suggest that both
writers were drawing on a common stock of classical writing on the sublime,
such as the interest in storm-tossed seas, earthquakes, clouds, and volcanoes.
Longinus’s sublime, like Lucretius’s, involves the imagination’s transcend-
ing the bounds of the universe, and it is stimulated by the indeterminate
reach of heights and depths.50
In contrast to Longinian theodicy, the Lucretian sublime posits, in Most’s

words, “the irrelevance of the gods and the fundamental randomness and
meaninglessness of the universe.”51 Longinus finds in spectacles of natural
immensity and power what Norbrook calls “a divine grandeur to which
our souls aspire,” so that “wonder leads to religious belief, admiration for
a divine Author who alone could account for such order.” DRN rejects
this grasping for supernatural explanation, leading nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century materialist thinkers including Marx, Tyndall, Haeckel,
Freud, Einstein, and, of course, Lovecraft, to return to it as the locus clas-
sicus of poetic atomism.
Norbrook writes, “For Lucretius, the horror inspired by the infinite
cosmos is to be strongly contrasted with fear of creating or punishing dei-
ties, animi terrores,” mere terrors of the mind, since “the supernatural
machineries and explanations” invented “to accommodate this wonder in
fact tame and diminish it.”52 Lucretius’s affective vocabulary informs the
difference between Lovecraft’s compound “cosmic horror” and Radcliffe’s
sublimated terror and abjected horror, a difference reflected in their con-
trastive approaches to literary supernaturalism.
The Cancer of Superstition: Lucretius’s Bastards

Whilst human kind
Throughout the lands lay miserably crushed
Before all eyes beneath Religion—who
Would show her head along the region skies,
Glowering on mortals with her hideous face—53
Lucretius
Enthron’d amid the wild impending rocks,
Involv’d in clouds, and brooding future woe,
The demon Superstition Nature shocks,
And waves her Sceptre o’er the world below.
Ann Radcliffe
Lucretius insists that belief in such supernatural conceits as immortal

souls and divine reward and punishment lead to oppression and misery,
personified in the dreadful specter of Religio, described in the passage
above. Opposed to this personification of animi terrores is the dynamism
of nature viewed through Epicurus’s atomistic philosophy, which carries
the mind “beyond the flaming walls of the world.” As James I. Porter
explains, “The entire thrust of the atomistic critique of nature was in a
sense Kantian (proto-Enlightenment) in spirit: its aim was to demytholo-
gize nature, to liberate mankind from blinding superstition and to render
nature susceptible of dispassionate scientific (rational) analysis.”54 In the
Critique of Judgment, Kant builds on Lucretius’s epistemological turn and
rhetorical structure alike in asserting the mind’s primacy over the chaos of
sensual experience by portraying reason, like Lucretius’s epic hero
Epicurus, standing triumphant over the seductive, destructive threat of
the unquantifiable and the excessive.
This rhetorical structure, in which an enlightened naturalism over-
throws the oppressive force of cultic belief, is also mirrored throughout
Radcliffe’s Gothic fictions. This is made explicit in her early novel A Sicilian
Romance (1790) with the embedded poem, “Superstition: An Ode.” The
poem, a verse improvisation on Lucretius’s description of Religio, was
likely inspired by Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our
Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757). Burke upholds Lucretius’s
description of Religio as sublime due to its expression of obscurity;
Lucretius has not “said a single word which might in the least serve to
mark a single limb or feature of the phantom, which he intended to repre-
28 S. MORELAND
sent in all the horrors imagination can conceive.”55 Yet Burke is deeply
suspicious of Lucretius’s condemnation of Religio. In Eric Baker’s words,
the Enquiry was meant to counter “the privileging of theoretical knowl-
edge over feeling (of Locke’s Essay over Milton’s Paradise Lost).” Baker
explains that Burke “viewed Lucretius as complicitous in the rationalist
tendency to declare everything that cannot be clearly understood and
explained—such as the experience of the sublime—to be devoid of value.”56
One of Lovecraft’s “parallel natures” embraced this “rationalist ten-
dency” wholeheartedly. He echoes the description of obscure Religio sub-
tly in his tales, and more polemically in his letters and criticism, which link
superstition and religion (interchangeable terms for Lovecraft) to “heredi-
tary emotion”:
The crude human animal is ineradicably superstitious, and there is every

biological and historical reason why he should be. An irreligious barbarian is
a scientific impossibility. Rationalistic conceptions of the universe involve a
type of mental victory over hereditary emotion quite impossible to the
undeveloped and uneducated intellect.57
The relationship between cosmic horror and religious awe is another

region obscured in Ralickas’s roadmap. While identifying the problem
with uncritically conflating “the religious awe attendant on Burkean sub-
limity with Lovecraft’s anti-humanist category of cosmic horror,”58 she
contradicts his explicit alignment of cosmic horror with religious awe. (22)
Lovecraft writes that “cosmic fear” is rooted in “a psychological pattern”
“as deeply grounded in mental experience as any other pattern or tradition
of mankind, coeval with the religious feeling and closely related to many
aspects of it” (21).
Nor does Lovecraft’s understanding of cosmic horror as offering a
pleasurable, expansive awe akin to sublimity change in his later writings.
In a 1934 letter to R. H. Barlow, for example, he claims, “the seat of the
pleasure of the weird is certainly tremendously obscure. My own view is
that tales of the supernatural give one a sense of a greatly expanded
ego.” However, this sense of expansion is not linked, as it is for Radcliffe
or Kant, Good or Gould, to a moral intuition or intimation of divinity,
what Eliot called a “semi-ethical” criterion. Rather, Lovecraft under-
stands it as dependent on an apparent and momentary “conquest of the
galling limitations of time, space & natural law,” while admitting “that
may be only part of the story. It would hardly explain why the terrible is
preferred to other forms of the supernatural.”59 In his 1933 essay “Notes

on Writing Weird Fiction,” Lovecraft returns to SHL’s opening sen-
tence to explain the lure of the terrible: “These stories frequently
emphasize the element of horror because fear is our deepest and stron-
gest emotion, and the one which best lends itself to the creation of
nature-defying illusions.”60
Gould or William James would assume the atheistic Lovecraft’s “mor-
bid metaphysics” prevented his conversion of cosmic horror into cosmic
pleasure. Ralickas’s understanding of cosmic horror as abjection would
lead us to expect a jolt of jouissance and ego-dystonic disgust. Lovecraft,
however, manifestly found ego-expansive enjoyment in the cosmic horror
fictions he canonized, and sought to produce them in those he wrote.
While Ligotti’s fiction seethes in the direction of an anti-humanist abjec-
tion irreconcilable with the sublime, he also notes the difference between
this and what Lovecraft understood as cosmic horror: “For Lovecraft, cos-
mic wonder and a ‘tranquility tinged with terror,’ as the British political
theorist and aesthetician Edmund Burke referred to such experiences,
were basic to his interest in remaining alive.”61
This association of cosmic horror with religious awe is crucial to the
polemical purpose of SHL, whose “sensitive” readers are expected to sub-
limate innate “religious feeling” into the “literature of cosmic fear.” Such
readers gratify “hereditary emotion” while still attaining an eminently
Epicurean “mental victory” over it. They contrast with “the herd” for
whom religion is necessary, a 1929 letter states, as “it helps their orderly
conduct as nothing else could.”62 Thus, Lovecraft espouses a religiously
structured social conservatism very close to that articulated, a century and
a half earlier, by Burke. Alien to the revolutionary spirit of eighteenth-
century Gothicists including Radcliffe, William Godwin, and Charles
Brockden Brown, Burke’s conservatism resurges in the work of the most
influential writer and critic of supernatural fiction in the Romantic period,
Sir Walter Scott.
Scott’s introduction to an 1811 reprint of Walpole’s Castle of Otranto
develops the idea that “Romantic narrative is of two kinds—that which,
being in itself possible, may be the matter of belief at any period; and that
which, though held impossible by more enlightened ages, was yet conso-
nant with the faith of earlier times.”63 Otranto embodies the latter. Despite
its historical significance, Lovecraft is contemptuous of Otranto, which is
entirely “devoid of the true cosmic horror.” (27) Scott, on the other hand,
privileges Walpole’s approach over Radcliffe’s Enlightenment skepticism:
30 S. MORELAND
The bold assertion of the actual existence of phantoms and apparitions

seems to us to harmonize much more naturally with the manners of feudal
times, and to produce a more powerful effect upon the reader’s mind, than
any attempt to reconcile the superstitious credulity of feudal ages with the
philosophic skepticism of our own.64
Scott follows Burke in using Gothic supernaturalism to develop a reli-

gious, nationalist, and culturally conservative historical consciousness.
Stephen King once famously compared horror writers, with their profes-
sional exploitation of all-too-common fears, to a “Republican banker in a
three-piece suit,” and a straight line can be drawn from the truth of this
observation to many of the Horror Boom’s Greatest Hits, back through
Lovecraft and Scott to Burke’s Gothic political theology.
Despite this political kinship, Lovecraft’s dislike for Scott is presented
openly in his letters, and more subtly by SHL’s stinting praise. Scott “fre-
quently concerns himself with the weird,” has “great respect” for the
supernatural (a backhanded compliment much like that SHL pays to the
“Hebrew imagination,” as Sharon Packer’s contribution to this volume
explores), and his Letters on Witchcraft and Demonology are valuable com-
pendia (35). But despite Scott’s titanic stature in the early nineteenth cen-
tury, Lovecraft can bring himself to say nothing good about Scott’s fiction
or literary criticism. The Romantic-era writers Lovecraft does praise are
those whose writings display a “parallel nature” akin to his own: Mary
Shelley, whose Frankenstein “has the true touch of cosmic fear” (35),
Radcliffe, and, of course, Poe. These are the precursors to the modern
“speculative scepticism” he associates with cosmic horror. Each of them
drew directly on Lucretius in their own fictions, signaling their weirdly
materialist orientations.65
SHL particularly praises Radcliffe, underlining her anticipation of Poe.
She masters “atmospheric creation,” has a strong “sense of the unearthly”
and “visual imagination,” and is a “fresh luminary of wholly superior
order” who “set new and higher standards in the domain of macabre and
fear-inspiring atmosphere” (29). Nevertheless, Radcliffe’s Enlightenment
naturalism, or at least her lack of legerdemain in maintaining it, leads
Lovecraft to join Scott in condemning her “custom of destroying her own
phantoms at the last through laboured mechanical explanations.” He
instead praises Radcliffe’s bête noire and exemplar of a “positive horror”
incompatible with the sublime, Matthew Lewis, quipping that, while his
work is uneven, Lewis at least “never ruined his ghostly visions with a
natural explanation” (30).66
Radcliffe’s “mechanical explanations” underscored a crucial problem
for Lovecraft’s ideal of cosmic horror, which increasingly demanded both
rigorous naturalism and the disruptions of time, space, and natural law
necessary for the expansive affect he sought to evoke. That Lucretius was
important to Lovecraft’s passage beyond this aporia is suggested as early as
a 1920 letter to Alfred Galpin:
As to any especial “creed of speculative scepticism”, as Gahal-Bah describes

his present need, I would advise Epicureanism as a base. That old geezer had
the right idea, and drew from the right sources, largely my old friend
Democritus. Read Lucretius’ “De Rerum Natura” for the best possible
exposition of this unsurpassed philosophy.67
That his return to these writers while preparing SHL led Lovecraft back
to Lucretius, even if unconsciously, is suggested by the dream he experi-
enced a couple of months after completing revisions to the typescript of
the essay.68 In the version described in a letter to Bernard Austin Dwyer,
Lovecraft writes that he was
in my own library, and there lay on the table the copy of Lucretius De Rerum
Natura that I had been reading, rolled about three-quarters toward the end
to the astronomical part in Book V which I had reached when Cnaeus
Balbutius had been announced. I can still see the line where I left off –
LUNAQUE.SIVE.NOTHO.FERTUR.LOCA.LUMINE.LUSTRANS69
William Ellery Leonard translates the passage in question as:
And whether the journeying moon illuminate

The regions round with bastard beams, or throw
From off her proper body her own light,
Whichever it be, she journeys with a form
Not larger than the form doth seem to be
Which we with eyes of ours perceive.70
Here, Lucretius’s Epicurean physics are at their most incompatible with

modern science due to naïve empiricism. While Lucretius remains agnostic
about whether the moon reflects the sun’s light or emits her own, he con-
32 S. MORELAND
fidently declares that the moon must be roughly the size it appears to our
eyes; if it appeared smaller because it was at a great distance from us, it
would necessarily also appear to be distorted or hazy. Lucretius’s descrip-
tion of the moon’s “bastard light,” an ancient example of speculative skep-
ticism, offered Lovecraft a visual intimation of the supplemental
non-supernatural mode he would later conceive.
Lovecraft understands cosmic horror, related to the affective state of
religious sublimity, as a “rich emotional experience” and an “ineradicable”
component of human psychology. But it is a state that inspires grasping
speculations that have no place in scientific philosophy, one that thereby
feeds the “cancer” of superstition and religious belief. In a 1929 letter,
Lovecraft claims, “I feel a great cleavage betwixt emotion and perceptive
analysis, and never try to mix the two. Emotionally I stand breathless at
the awe and loveliness and mystery of space with its ordered suns and
worlds.” However, he goes on, “when I start thinking I throw off emo-
tion as excess baggage.”71 Unlike Clifford and James, Lovecraft abjects
cosmic emotion from philosophical and scientific inquiry. Colliding and
combining with cognitive disruption, cosmic emotion becomes atmo-
sphere, the structural emotion that defines weird literature. Atmosphere is
a kind of “bastard light” produced by rationality’s entanglement with
“hereditary emotion.” It makes possible what Lovecraft describes in a
1930 letter as “my big kick,” which
comes from taking reality just as it is—accepting all the limitations of the
most orthodox science—and then permitting my symbolising faculty to
build outward from the existing facts; rearing a structure of indefinite prom-
ise and possibility whose topless towers are in no cosmos or dimension pen-
etrable by the contradicting-power of the tyrannous and inexorable intellect.
But the whole secret of the kick is that I know damn well it isn’t so.72
The phrasing of this formulation displays its ancestry, echoing as it does

Poe’s poem “The City in the Sea,” which in turn echoes a passage from
DRN V, also the inspiration for Lovecraft’s earlier Roman dream. The writ-
ers on whom SHL’s bastard light shines brightest are those who come closest
to this kick. Not those, like Walpole or Scott, who “respect” the supernatu-
ral, but those who sublimate the affective intensity that gives rise to it, com-
bining it with “speculative scepticism” to create “serious” atmosphere.73
Magna Mat(t)er: Lucretius’s Dismorphmythic

Materials
Both the 1920 letter to Galpin and the 1929 letter to Harris also reveal
how interwoven Lovecraft’s philosophical aesthetics, including his admi-
ration for Lucretius, are with his racializing beliefs. Immediately after rec-
ommending DRN ’ s exposition of Epicurean philosophy to Galpin as the
best base for “speculative scepticism,” Lovecraft states, “There are many
reasons why moderns can never surpass Epicurus, among them racial infe-
riority. We are certainly as far below the Greeks as, for example, the
Mongolians are below us.”74 Byron Nakamura explains how Lovecraft’s
racialized cultural anxieties infiltrate his Lucretius-inspired Roman dream
of 1927: “Onto the Roman landscape he projected not unknown or
unnameable terrors but terrors very real to the author: the terrors of
change in the form of foreign immigrants, eastern invaders, and the per-
ceived decline of the west.”75 These “very real terrors” drove Lovecraft’s
powerful sense of identification with both the early eighteenth-century
English and the first-century Roman writer whose literary fragments he
shored against the maelstrom of the modern. Modernity for Lovecraft
meant cosmopolitical horror, marked by immigration and mechanization,
and the atmosphere of cosmic horror was both an assault on and a refuge
from such threats.
In his nostalgia for the Augustan, Lovecraft ironically brought himself
closer to the cultural politics of the early Gothic sublime than to its more
cosmic descendants. According to Karalis, the fascination with the sublime
intensified as “the ‘universalism’ of the European Enlightenment had to
face the growing differences between European societies” and “the chal-
lenge from the ‘savages’ in the ‘new’ countries.”76 Karalis points to Kant’s
pre-Critical Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (1764,
notably the same year that Walpole published The Castle of Otranto) to
exemplify this tension. Observations claims that “savages have little feeling
for the beautiful in moral understanding,” and that the “remaining natives
of this part of the world show few traces of a mental character disposed to
the finer feelings, and an extraordinary apathy constitutes the mark of this
type of race.”77 Karalis argues that Kant’s later Critiques “transcended his
own youthful arrogance,” introducing “the destabilizing factor of the sub-
lime as a mental category to indicate those elements of feeling, structure,
and representation that couldn’t be accommodated to the dominant hori-
zons for the production of meaning.”78 In short, Karalis interprets the
34 S. MORELAND
Kantian Critical sublime as a means of displacing the presumption of cul-

tural superiority inherent in universalizing aesthetic judgments.
Lovecraft’s return to a particularly eighteenth-century brand of racial-
izing aesthetic theory is evident in SHL, whose literary and affective hier-
archies in turn suggest a hierarchy of readers and culture streams.79 As
Silvia Moreno-Garcia writes of SHL’s opening sentence,
The unknown, for Lovecraft, is not limited to an external “cosmic” horror;”

“The “unknown” for Lovecraft is often an “inner” horror rooted in biology
and the site of the “unknown” ceases to be an abstract space and becomes
the human body, including the white male body, a body which is always in
danger or under siege. Lovecraft’s men are engaged in a biological battle.80
Cosmic horror, as Lovecraft conceived of it, is caught up in this per-

ceived “biological battle,” in which, in Gina Wisker’s words, a major
source of “fear and distaste is the women, the source of whatever is being
bred.”81 Wisker’s contribution to this volume expands upon what she calls
Lovecraft’s dismorphmythia, his identification of women with a merely
material, and most often monstrous, body. Going back to, and beyond,
the Homeric epic, the dismorphmythic has an ancient tradition, including
DRN. Lucretius’s gendered poetics reinforce traditional associations of
femininity with both vital, mutable, but insentient materiality (personified,
eroticized Nature) and irrational, but hereditary, superstition (the goddess
Religio). It is precisely here, in the formless fecundity of the Magna Mater,
that Lovecraft’s few fictional women and many fictional monsters
converge.
Conversely, Lucretius celebrates an Epicurean masculinity of spectato-
rial rationality, a crucial precursor both for the Regency Dandy and for the
fin-de-siècle flâneur that fascinated Lovecraft, as illuminated by Vivian
Ralickas’s chapter. Like Lovecraft’s other Lucretian materials, however,
these gendered poetics were mutated through First World War-era dis-
courses of nationalism, eugenics, and racial degeneration, before becom-
ing part of the “terrible sublime” of cosmic horror.82
The Consolation of (Cosmic) Philosophy

Could the Epicurean will hostile to pessimism be merely the prudence of a
suffering man? And even scientific enquiry itself, our science—indeed, what
does all scientific enquiry in general mean considered as a symptom of life?
Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music
Ralickas asks whether cosmic horror can be reconciled with “the sub-
lime turn.”83 Examining a number of Lovecraft’s fictions in detail, and
focusing on the fates of his characters rather than the affective responses
they generated for their author, and continue to generate for many read-
ers, she concludes that it cannot.
Many earlier readers implicitly asked the same question of Lucretius,
and came to the same conclusion. While Virgil, Ovid, and Horace found
sublimity in Lucretius, the sublime’s early modern association with
Longinus and monotheistic religion meant that modern readers often did
not, despite the attempts of interpreters like Good to recuperate Lucretius
for a Christianized Longinian sublime.
Like most of Lovecraft’s horror tales, DRN terminates with scenes of
abject horror, disease, irrational frenzy, and death. Despite its widespread
influence throughout the early modern, Enlightenment, and Romantic
periods, and its demonstrable influence on Addison, Burke and Kant’s
theories of the sublime, DRN was thought to lack “true” sublimity due to
its depiction of a radically material and entropic universe. Thus Milton
depicted Satan’s fall in terms of the Lucretian clinamen, building Hell
from his dark materials, a descent echoed by Percy Bysshe Shelley’s esti-
mation that Lucretius had “limed the wings of his swift spirit in the dregs
of the sensible world,” making his poetic trajectory a dynamics of descent.
Nevertheless, there is a sublime turn in Lucretius; it just does not cor-
respond to the crypto-apotheosis expected of its religious Longinian
counterpart. Because it does not lead to a felt “infinite presence,” it would
not be recognized as such by George M. Gould or Matthew Arnold.
Instead, the Lucretian sublime is, precisely, entropic. It responds to the
metamorphic dynamism of nature with commingled wonder and horror.
Transformations including death and disintegration are natural, inevitable,
and necessary, and should be met with ataraxia, rather than attempts to
escape death and posthumous punishment by appeasing the animi terrores
of Religio. DRN’s poetics of descent are, ultimately, meant to reinforce
this Epicurean ethos by preparing readers for their own inevitable
dissolution.
Apart from using Lucretian materials to develop his supplemental cos-
mic aesthetics, re-orient the history of literary supernaturalism, shore up
theories of racial degeneration, and reinforce assumptions of gendered
alterity, Lovecraft aspired to an Epicurean ethos throughout his life. This
is hauntingly expressed by a letter written to Nils Frome in 1937, during
Lovecraft’s slow death from intestinal cancer:
36 S. MORELAND
the notion of anything “immortal” about man or any biological organism—

that is, the notion of any qualities not dependent upon the cells of the mate-
rial body—is in the light of today’s knowledge wholly untenable … Who
really wants to be cosmically important? … Instead of fretting about being
insignificant, it’s up to us to enjoy the faculties we have—exercising our
intellectual curiosity in study, and our aesthetic sense in imaginative and
artistic creation … We are only a momentary accident—but even so, we
typify far subtler and more delicate energy-transformation processes than
any other objects within our field of view.84
This invocation of Lucretian entropy is tinged by the “religious feeling”

that for Lovecraft was inseparable from that incongruous, unsettling “cos-
mic emotion,” so much more than “mere” horror. Matthew Beach argues,
In his correspondence, Lovecraft often spoke of cosmic time to those strug-

gling with the very human problems of distress, illness, and loss. It seems
odd at first that Lovecraft would reference the very cosmic time he believes
renders human suffering “insignificant” in these moments, but it is clear
from his letters that he understands his cosmic philosophy as offering real
consolation.85
Despite his divorce from the naïve empiricism and indeterminacy of the
Epicurean picture of the universe, Lovecraft remained enrapt with the
Lucretian entropic sublime, with its wonder at the “delicate energy-
transformation processes” we tend to experience as fixed entities and
objects. This informs his attraction for contemporary philosophers from
Gilles Deleuze through Graham Harman and Patricia MacCormack; in
MacCormack’s words, Lovecraft’s cosmic horror “resonates with para-
digm shifts in philosophies of ecological ethics and what could be described
as a physics of radical alterity.”86 It is also central to Lovecraft’s importance
for contemporary writers including Caitlín R. Kiernan. Asked how her
study of paleontology and writing of fiction intersect, Kiernan’s reply reso-
nates with Lovecraft’s Lucretian sublimity:
I need a world filled with wonder, with awe, with awful things. I couldn’t exist
in a world devoid of marvels, even if the marvels are terrible marvels. Even if
they frighten me to consider them. What would be the point of a world like
that, a humdrum world of known quantities and everyday expectations? A lot
of people don’t grasp the importance of uncertainty to the scientific enter-
prise. A fact is only a momentary model of some aspect of the universe, backed
by explanatory theory, waiting to be revised upon further study.87
Contrarily, Thomas Ligotti’s writings come closer to the radical abjection

Ralickas finds in Lovecraft, mutating cosmic horror by evacuating it of
residual sublimity. For Ligotti, the cosmic collapses back into the
one thing we know is real: horror. It is so real, in fact, that we cannot be sure
it could not exist without us. Yes, it needs our imaginations and our con-
sciousness, but it does not ask or require our consent to use them. Indeed,
horror operates with complete autonomy. Generating ontological havoc, it
is mephitic foam upon which our lives merely float.88
Ligotti’s horror, this terrible slime, is cultured from the detestable putres-
cence left of Lovecraft’s corpus once the Lucretian sublime has been
sucked from it.
Notes
1. John Mason Good, The Nature of Things: A Didactic Poem Translated
from the Latin of Titus Lucretius Carus, Accompanied with the Original
Text, and Illustrated with Notes Philological and Explanatory, in Two
Volumes (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees and Orme, 1805), Volume I,
Book III, lines 297–301.
2. Carl Sederholm and Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, The Age of Lovecraft
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 235.
3. For a more general analysis of Lovecraft’s multifaceted reception of and
identification with Lucretius, see Sean Moreland, “The Poet’s Nightmare:
The Nature of Things According to Lovecraft” Lovecraftian Proceedings 2
(New York: Hippocampus Press, 2017), 31–46.
4. Brian Stableford, “The Cosmic Horror,” Icons of Horror and the
Supernatural, ed. S.T. Joshi (Westport: Greenwood, 2007), 65.
5. Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy against the Human Race: A Contrivance
of Horror (New York: Hippocampus, eBook version), 84.
6. John Mason Good, The Book of Nature, Complete in One Volume
(Harper’s Stereotype Edition) (Hartford: Belknap and Hamersley, 1839)
65. First published in 1826, but passing through numerous American and
British editions and translations throughout the nineteenth century, Book
of Nature and Good’s other writings shaped the literary visions of many of
the Romantic-era writers SHL canonizes, including Mary Shelley,
Hawthorne, and Poe. For the latter’s reception of Good, see Moreland,
“Beyond ‘De Rerum Naturâ, Esqr’: Lucretius, Poe, and John Mason
Good,” The Edgar Allan Poe Review, Spring 2016.
7. Good, Book, 65.
38 S. MORELAND
8. The Pall Mall Budget, Volume 31, 1883, 9. This reference was uncovered,
and the following discussion was shaped, by the use of Google Ngram to
search for references to “cosmic emotion,” “cosmic horror,” and related
bi-grams. Notably, “cosmic horror” peaks in the 1890s, during which time
all the references to it appear to be informed by Clifford via Gould. It peaks
again following Arkham House’s 1939 re-publication of SHL. By this
time, most uses of the phrase are directly informed by Lovecraft. By the
late 1960s, the term begins a slow, steady increase in use, continuing to be
widely associated with Lovecraft.
9. The OED records this as the first use of the phrase. See “cosmic, adj,” OED
Online, January 2018, Oxford University Press.
10. William Kingdon Clifford, “Cosmic Emotion,” The Popular Science
Monthly, V. 7–12, 1878, 74.
11. Clifford, 75.
12. Clifford, 75.
13. Clifford, 80.
14. Ligotti, Conspiracy, 83.
15. George M. Gould The Meaning and the Method of Life: A Search for
Religion in Biology (New York: Putnam’s, 1893), 8. Paul Di Filipo points
out this usage in “Malign Universe, 13 Works of Cosmic Horror.”
16. First published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1904 and turned into a longer
work in 1910. George M. Gould, “The Infinite Presence,” The Atlantic
Monthly, 1904. 785–795.
Gould also wrote what he called “Biographic Clinics,” brief medical
biographies of many late nineteenth-/early twentieth-century writers,
including Darwin, Nietzsche, and de Quincey.
17. Gould, “The Infinite Presence,” 787.
18. Gould, “The Infinite Presence,” 787.
19. Miéville, Age of Lovecraft, 235.
20. Blackwood, “The Willows,” The Weird, edited by Ann and Jeff Vander
Meer, 30.
21. Blackwood, 31.
22. H.P. Lovecraft, The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature, edited
by S.T. Joshi (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2000). Subsequent citations
from this volume are indicated by in-text pagination.
23. Stableford, “Cosmic Horror,” 66.
24. Joshi, A Subtler Magick (Gillette, NJ: Wildside Press, 1996), 30.
25. Mathias Clasen, Why Horror Seduces (New York: Oxford, 2017), 13.
26. Gerry Carlin and Nicola Allen, “Slime and Western Man: H. P. Lovecraft
in the Time of Modernism,” ed. David Simmons, New Critical Essays on
H.P. Lovecraft (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 78.
27. Norman R. Gayford, “The Artist as Antaeus,” An Epicure in the Terrible

ed. S.T. Joshi and David Schultz (Teaneck, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson U.P,
1999) and H.P. Lovecraft, Selected Letters (hereafter SL) Volume 1 (Sauk
City: Arkham House, 1971), 262.
28. Lovecraft, SL 3, 195.
29. T.S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” The Norton Anthology of
Theory and Criticism, ed. Vincent B. Leitch (New York: Norton, 2001),
1094.
30. Eliot, 1096.
31. Alex Houstoun, “Lovecraft and the sublime: A reinterpretation,” Lovecraft
Annual No. 5 (2011): 160–180. Vivian Ralickas, “Cosmic horror and the
question of the sublime in Lovecraft,” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts
18/3 (2008): 364–398.
32. See Dale J. Nelson, “Lovecraft and the Burkean Sublime,” Lovecraft
Studies 24 (1991 Spring): 2–5, and Bradley A. Will, “H.P. Lovecraft and
the Semiotic Kantian Sublime,” Extrapolation: A Journal of Science Fiction
and Fantasy 43.1 (2002 Spring): 7–21.
33. Ralickas, “Cosmic Horror,” 390, 366.
34. Ralickas, “Cosmic Horror,” 387. While Clasen is among the commenta-
tors to remark on the unscientific basis of Kristeva’s influential theory (Why
Horror Seduces, 16–17) one need not accept her dubious developmental
metapsychology or privileging of Lacanian concepts to appreciate the value
of her contribution for a historical poetics of horror. Her theory has a
shared literary and philosophical ancestry with Lovecraft’s cosmic horror;
Kristeva explains her formative dialectical materialism as “Hegel over-
turned by Lucretius, Mallarmé and Freud.” She and Lovecraft similarly
draw on a Lucretian dynamics of descent and a Freudian emphasis on a
physiologically determined unconscious as a means of displacing idealist
philosophy.
35. Ralickas, “Cosmic Horror,” 367.
36. Karalis, “Disambiguating the Sublime,” 3.
38. J.D. Worthington, “Queen Anne is [not] Dead,” Lovecraft and Influence:
His Predecessors and Successors, ed. Robert Waugh (Lanham, MD: The
Scarecrow Press, 2013), 15.
39. Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, The Spectator No. 418 (1712).
40. Addison, The Spectator No. 418 (1712).
41. Addison, The Spectator No. 420, July 2, 1712.
42. Anne Janowitz, “The Sublime Plurality of Worlds,” http://www.tate.org.
uk/research/publications/tate-papers/13/the-sublime-plurality-of-
worlds-lucretius-in-the-eighteenth-century#footnote3_d9gftef
43. Kant, Critique of Judgement, 147.
40 S. MORELAND

45. Glenn Most, “The Sublime, Today,” Dynamic Reading: Studies in the
Reception of Epicureanism, ed. Brooke Holmes, W. H. Shearin (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2012), 240.
46. John Dennis, The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry, Contain’d in Some New
Discoveries Never Made Before, Requisite for the Writing and Judging of
Poems Surely Being a Preliminary to a Larger Work Design’d to Be Publish’d
in Folio, and Entituled, A Criticism upon Our Most Celebrated English Poets
Deceas’d. By Mr. Dennis (London: George Strahan, 1704), 68.
47. Dennis, Grounds of Criticism, 87.
48. Most, “The Sublime, Today,” 240.
49. As S.T. Joshi explains, “the Epicurean philosophy embodied in Lucretius
was a central influence in [Lovecraft’s] early thought.” S.T. Joshi, I Am
Providence: The Life and Times of H.P. Lovecraft Volume 1 (New York, NY:
Hippocampus Press, 2013), 61–2.
50. David Norbrook, “Milton, Lucy Hutchinson, and the Lucretian Sublime,”
Tate Papers 13, np. http://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-
papers/13/milton-lucy-hutchinson-and-the-lucretian-sublime
51. Most, 249–50.
52. David Norbrook, “Lucretian Sublime,” np.
53. Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, trans. William Ellery Leonard (New
York: J.M. Dent, 1916), Book I, 5. Leonard was the first American English
translator of Lucretius and one of Lovecraft’s contemporaries. While I’ve
seen no evidence they met, both men were friends with August Derleth,
and both also wrote appreciations of Frank Belknap Long’s writings.
Leonard’s often incapacitating agoraphobia seems reflected in the anxious
efficacy and alienation of his translation of many of Lucretius’s descriptions
of immensity and the void, lending his version further resonance with
Lovecraft.
54. James I. Porter, The Sublime in Antiquity, 469.
55. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the
Sublime and Beautiful, ed. James T. Boulton, London 1958,152 [III.21].
For Burke’s relationship to Lucretius and Epicurean thought, see Paddy
Bullard, “Epicurean Aesthetics of the Philosophical Enquiry,” Edmund
Burke and the Art of Rhetoric (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2011).
56. Eric Baker, “Lucretius in the European Enlightenment,” The Cambridge
Companion to Lucretius (Cambridge University Press, 2007), 284.
57. Lovecraft, SL2, 269; see also Joshi, Subtler Magick, 34.
59. O Fortunate Floridian, 131–2.
60. CE 2, 176.
61. Ligotti, Conspiracy, 83

62. Lovecraft, SL2, 310.
63. Sir Walter Scott, critical introduction to The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic
Story, by Horace Walpole (Edinburgh: Ballantyne and Co., 1811), xxii.
64. Scott, introduction to The Castle of Otranto, xxvi.
65. For a detailed discussion of the contrastive approaches of Radcliffe, Scott,
and Poe to Lucretian materialism and the supernatural, see Moreland,
“Ancestral Piles: Poe’s Gothic Precursors,” The Oxford Handbook of Edgar
Allan Poe, edited by J. Gerald Kennedy and Scott Peeples (Oxford
University Press, 2018).
66. In this respect, Lovecraft closely echoes both Scott’s explicit and Poe’s
implicit criticisms of Radcliffe’s work, and the latter certainly shaped
Lovecraft’s views.
68. For a detailed description of this dream, its variants and significance to
Lovecraft’s literary imagination, see Byron Nakamura, “Dreams of
Antiquity: H.P. Lovecraft’s Great Roman Dream of 1927,” Lovecraftian
Proceedings 2, 13–30.
69. Lovecraft, SL 2, 190; DRN V.575.
70. DRN, trans. Leonard, V, 211.
72. Quoted in S.T. Joshi, “Poe, Lovecraft and the Revolution in Weird
Fiction,” (paper presented at Ninth Annual Commemoration Program of
the Poe Society, October 7, 2012), http://www.eapoe.org/papers/psblc-
trs/pl20121.html
73. For a discussion of the verbal parallels and their importance, see Moreland,
“Not Like Any Thing of Ours,” The Lovecraftian Poe, 224–226.
75. Nakamura, “Dreams,” 28–29.
76. Karalis, 3.
77. Karalis, 3, quoting Kant, Observations 112.
78. Karalis, 3.
79. For a broad analysis of how misogyny and racial anthropology converge in
Lovecraft’s thought and the eugenics movement, as well as how contem-
porary women writers work with and through this aspect of Lovecraft’s
work, see Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Magna Mater: Women and Eugenic
Thought in the Work of H.P. Lovecraft (University of British Columbia MA
Thesis). For an analysis of how underlying pseudo-scientific and racial
anthropological principles inform Lovecraft’s criticism and fiction, see Dan
Clinton, “The Call of Ligeia: Influence and Effect in Poe and Lovecraft,”
The Lovecraftian Poe, 27–50, and Jeffrey Shanks, “Darwin and the Deep
Ones,” Lovecraftian Proceedings 2, 131–144.
42 S. MORELAND
80. Moreno-Garcia, Magna Mater, 6.

81. Gina Wisker, “‘Spawn of the pit’: Lavinia, Marceline, Medusa and All
Things Foul: Lovecraft’s Liminal Women,” New Critical Essays on
H.P. Lovecraft, ed. David Simmons (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2013), 31.
82. Lovecraft amplifies an association between femaleness, materiality, and
maternity, versus a masculine rationality that is traditional in Western litera-
ture and philosophy, as feminist critics at least since Simone de Beauvoir
have noted. For the gendering of Lucretius’s poetics, see S. Georgia
Nugent, S. “‘Mater’” Matters: The Female in Lucretius’s De Rerum
Natura,” Colby Quarterly 30, no. 3 (1994): 179, and Don Fowler, “The
Feminine Principle: Gender in the De Rerum Natura,” Lucretius on Atomic
Motion (Oxford University Press, 2002), 444–452.
85. Matthew Beach, “H.P. Lovecraft’s Optimism,” Lovecraftian Proceedings 2,
171–2.
86. The Age of Lovecraft, 199. Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock eloquently interro-
gates such speculative appropriations in the same volume.
87. Kiernan, interview with Jeremy Jones: http://clarkesworldmagazine.
com/kiernan_interview/
88. Ligotti, Conspiracy, 272. Conspiracy includes a stark evisceration of
Epicurean philosophy and Lucretius’s arguments against the fear of death.
CHAPTER 3
The Evolution of Horror:

A Neo-Lovecraftian Poetics
Mathias Clasen
Introduction: Lovecraft, Horror, and Naturalistic

Psychology
H. P. Lovecraft’s Supernatural Horror in Literature (SHL) is justly cele-
brated as a pioneering, systematic study of horror and the weird and as a
window into the machine room of his aesthetic vision.1 Lovecraft built his
poetics on the science and scholarship of his day, not just drawing on liter-
ary history and folklore studies but incorporating findings from such dis-
ciplines as psychology, anthropology, and biology. His vision was highly
integrative and what we today would call consilient or vertically inte-
grated.2 Lovecraft saw no radical disjuncture—ontological or epistemo-
logical—between human biology and human culture, between human
nature and human imaginative production. Yet for most of the twentieth
century, the humanities and the evolutionary social sciences drifted ever
farther apart.3 Very little academic horror scholarship has built explicitly
on findings and theories from the sciences of human nature. With the
poststructuralist revolution and its rejection of “human nature” as a bio-
logical reality with causal impact on the subject matter of the humanities,
horror scholarship turned away from cutting-edge social science. Insofar
M. Clasen (*)
Department of English, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark

44 M. CLASEN
as horror scholars attempted to integrate psychological theory in their

studies, they tended to rely on Freudian models—orthodox psychoanaly-
sis or revisionist Freudianism such as Lacanian or Kristevan psychoanaly-
sis4—which are based on speculation unconstrained by empirical evidence
and scientific standards of rational inquiry.5 It is a little ironic, then, that
key aspects of Lovecraft’s poetics are corroborated by recent advances in
evolutionary psychology, the cognitive science of religion, and cognitive
and affective neuroscience. He was more right than he could have known.
This chapter extracts key claims from SHL and examines them in light
of current findings from the sciences of human nature. I argue that
Lovecraft’s poetics of horror and weird fiction is eminently compatible
with a modern scientific understanding of human nature and human cul-
ture. I begin by delineating the evolutionary underpinnings of fear and
horror. I then examine the human tendency for hyperactive agency detec-
tion, which helps explain why supernatural horror stories can be so com-
pelling even to people who do not believe in the supernatural. Next I
examine the biological substrate of phobia and horror monsters, and
finally I look at research on the audience for horror and weird fiction.
Lovecraft was right to emphasize fear as a primal emotion, and to posit
horror as a genre that grows out of evolved dispositions and has a peculiar
resonance with ancient structures in human nature. Whether he was right
about the narrow appeal of weird fiction we can’t yet say, but horror more
broadly attracts a very large audience. The reasons are in human nature,
rooted in a fondness for imaginative fear scenarios and activities that give
us vicarious experience with danger. Academic horror scholarship, I argue,
has much to gain from discarding obsolete psychological theories and
looking to up-to-date, scientific research in its search for the psychological
underpinnings of horror and the weird—and Lovecraft already did a good
deal of groundwork in this field.
“The Oldest and Strongest Emotion”:

On the Evolution of Fear and Horror
The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and
strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown … As may naturally be expected
of a form so closely connected with primal emotion, the horror-tale is as old
as human thought and speech themselves. (23)
THE EVOLUTION OF HORROR: A NEO-LOVECRAFTIAN POETICS 45
Horror stories are affectively defined according to intended audience

reaction. As Douglas E. Winter famously asserted in 1982, “horror is not
a genre … it is an emotion.”6 A horror story that does not evoke some
amount of negative emotion in its reader is likely to be considered, at least
by most consumers, a failure. Conversely, the potential of a horror novel
or film to evoke negative emotion in its audience is frequently used as a
central element in marketing campaigns. “This may be the most terrifying
science fiction novel you will ever read!!!!!!” proclaimed the cover of one
edition of Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend. “The Scariest Movie of All
Time,” announced the movie poster for the 2001 re-release of The Exorcist.
“Be Afraid. Be Very Afraid,” said the tagline for the 1986 version of The
Fly. Of course, horror scholars and fans also read horror literature and
watch horror films not to be frightened but for their genre-historical or
aesthetic value. Horror enthusiasts watch and study Nosferatu with delight
even though the 1922 silent film presumably does not terrify or frighten
them. The point remains: The typical consumer of horror—the consumer
toward whom those blurbs and taglines are directed—expects to be moved
along an axis of negative affect: scared, disturbed, possibly even terrified.
In the following, I take “horror” to encompass the kind of entertain-
ment that is designed to scare and/or disturb its audience. In this usage,
horror encompasses Gothic fiction, dark fantasy, genre hybrids such as I
Am Legend (science fiction/horror), a subset of thrillers (such as Silence of
the Lambs, which manifestly aims at producing negative affect in its audi-
ence, but unlike “pure” suspense stories such as some of Hitchcock’s
films), slashers, splatterpunk, and so on—even the weird stories that are
Lovecraft’s primary concern in SHL. Lovecraft distinguishes weird stories
from another type of “fear-literature” that presumably corresponds to
most people’s conception of mainstream horror fiction: “This type of fear-
literature [i.e., weird fiction] must not be confounded with a type exter-
nally similar but psychologically widely different; the literature of mere
physical fear and the mundanely gruesome” (22). Weird horror, in
Lovecraft’s conception, produces a psychological response that is different
from, yet overlaps with, the response produced by less cerebral sorts of
horror—as he said, the “true weird tale has something more than secret
murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to
rule” (22–23). The “true” weird tale thus targets a wider range of nega-
tive emotion, from visceral revulsion to existential terror. Hence I use
“horror” as an umbrella term because it encompasses the set of negative
emotions targeted by “the literature of mere physical fear and the
46 M. CLASEN
mundanely gruesome” as well as those targeted by weird stories. “Horror,”

then, denotes both an emotion complex and a broad genre of fiction.
The set of negative emotions targeted by horror fiction have their neu-
rological basis in biological mechanisms that evolved to protect organisms
from harm.7 Our species has been billions of years under way; we evolved
from earlier forms of organic life and retain some of their traits. Humans
don’t look much like algae, mosquitoes, or sticklebacks, but we share a
range of characteristics with such life forms. Many features of human phys-
iology, anatomy, and even psychology have been conserved across millions
of years of evolution. We share physiological processes with other forms of
multicellular life, a symmetric body organized around a spinal column
with life forms radically different from us, and psychological dispositions
with other primates and mammals.8 The fight-or-flight response—evident
whenever a horror movie audience reacts to a jump scare—is one that we
share even with reptiles and fishes. Existential terror, a peculiarly human
form of anxiety, is no less rooted in neurocognitive adaptations. Lovecraft
himself was fascinated by the idea that perfect awareness leads to total hor-
ror and that certain percepts might drive us mad. Modern neuroscience
has identified no such percepts, but it has vindicated the notion that con-
sciousness and self-awareness leave us vulnerable to abject fear. As the
philosopher Stephen Asma puts it: “Neocortical expansion creates space
for reflective symbolic counterfactual thinking, and along with that great
privilege comes relentless horror.”9
Lovecraft was right to talk about fear as a “primal emotion.” Fear and
anxiety—the chief emotions targeted by horror in whatever medium—are
functional, adapted mechanisms with roots in prehistoric vertebrate evolu-
tion. Our ancestors consistently found themselves in dangerous environ-
ments. They faced danger from predators, venomous animals, hostile
members of their own species, hazardous topological features, dangerous
weather events, and so on.10 That existence gradually shaped human
nature. Even today, people are born with a suite of genetically transmitted
mechanisms that enable them to swiftly and automatically detect even
subtle cues of danger and to adequately react to those cues.11 Fear and
anxiety produce instantaneous calibrations of physiology and cognition,
focusing our attention on the potential threat, diverting resources away
from irrelevant somatic processes such as digestion and toward the large
muscle groups to provide fuel for fighting or fleeing. Fear is the adaptive
response to imminent danger, whereas anxiety—which tends to produce
probing behavior, unlike fear, which produces urgent evasion or a ggressive
behavior—is the adaptive response to a distant or potential threat.12 Both

emotions are functional components of the evolved “fear module.”13 That
module is characterized by swiftness, automaticity, and hyper-reactivity.
We tend to overreact when we detect cues of possible danger (a rustling in
the leaves during a stroll in twilit woods) because a false positive is vastly
better than a false negative.14 It is better to jump at rustlings that turn out
to be the wind playing with leaves than to shrug at rustlings that turn out
to signal the footfall of an ambush predator.
As Lovecraft suggested in SHL—using a slightly different vocabulary—
horror fiction capitalizes on the evolved structure of the human fear mod-
ule. Such fiction provides imaginative representations of threat
scenarios—fear-, anxiety-, and/or disgust-inducing situations and
agents—and uses formal techniques to facilitate audience transportation
“into” these scenarios. We are faced with evocative depictions of predatory
monsters and disgusting creatures that reflect evolutionarily recurrent
threats, and we are invited to share the perspective and emotional apprais-
als of protagonists who face imminent or potential danger from these
monsters. Horror fiction tends to provide fairly explicit and elaborate
descriptions of characters’ emotional states to allow for emotional conta-
gion between characters and audience,15 and thus to sustain empathic
engagement. In Lovecraft’s 1927 story “Pickman’s Model,” for example,
the narrator Thurber details his experiences with his friend Pickman’s ter-
rifying artwork and repeatedly dwells on his own reactions to these experi-
ences: “There was something very disturbing about [Pickman’s] nauseous
sketches … I could not for my life keep back a loud scream … I had to
choke back a flood of reaction.” Shortly thereafter, Thurber hears “a faint
scurrying sound somewhere … I thought of huge rats and shuddered …
[a clattering sound] set me all in gooseflesh.”16 The emotional contagion
produced by Thurber’s subjective narration strengthens the reader’s
response to the disturbing subject matter of the story.
Homo sapiens is a neophile species, incurably curious. Lovecraft spoke
of our “inevitable fascination of wonder and curiosity.”17 And like Thurber,
we are morbidly drawn toward dark and disturbing aesthetic subject mat-
ter. Our curiosity about monsters and horror is an adaptive trait that lets
us learn about danger and one that we share with several other species.
The fear module is hardwired into our nervous systems, but it needs envi-
ronmental calibration to function properly. Curiosity about danger,
including fictional representations of threat scenarios, is a means for cali-
brating our fear module.18 As the ethologist Hans Kruuk puts it, humans
48 M. CLASEN
have “a great need to stare at the tools of the grim reaper,” to learn about
“the mechanisms of danger, and the fate of the attacked.”19 Kruuk has
documented predator curiosity in a range of other species, from black-
headed gulls to Thomson’s gazelles. When a conspecific—a member of
their own species—is attacked by a predator, these animals don’t just flee
the scene to keep safe. They retreat to a safe distance and pay close atten-
tion to the often grisly assault. That way, they learn about the predation
techniques and strategies of whatever grim reapers prey on their kind.
Our innate curiosity is tempered by an evolved fear of the unknown.20
The unknown—“being likewise the unpredictable,” as Lovecraft pointed
out (21)—can be dangerous because it is impossible to prepare for.
Preparedness breeds survival, and curiosity breeds preparedness. Hence
we are not just afraid of the unknown, but curious about it, too: “Fear of
the unknown [is] balanced by curiosity about it at a certain level of per-
ceived safety.” The partially unknown can become the object of awe, an
emotion that arises in response to “perceived vastness and a need to
accommodate that which can’t be assimilated by current cognitive struc-
tures.”21 Lovecraft’s weird creatures, uncanny forces, and ancient gods are
structured to elicit awe as they come into conflict with our understanding
of what can be, as they breach perceived natural laws of possibility.
Lovecraft understood very well the peculiar fascination that the awesome
unknown commands. In “Pickman’s Model,” strange noises in Pickman’s
“dark cellar” send Pickman scrambling for his revolver. Something—
something big and dangerous and possibly unnatural—emerges from a
brick well in Pickman’s basement. Thurber and the reader never learn
what that is—clearly not rats, as Pickman claims, but presumably one of
the monsters depicted in Pickman’s paintings. The description of one such
monster evokes a supernormal predator: “It was a colossal and nameless
blasphemy with glaring red eyes, and it held in bony claws a thing that had
been a man.”22 It is also shrouded in mystery and never directly depicted,
which adds to its awesomeness. Unlike feline terrestrial predators, say,
Lovecraft’s monster is a “blasphemy.” It is a violation of natural law—not
just terrifying but awe-inspiring, even revolting in its affront to moral
order.
Horror monsters tend to be disgusting—always fearsome, sometimes
awe-inspiring, and usually unclean and revolting. As Noël Carroll puts it,
they “are putrid or moldering things, or they hail from oozing places, or
they are made of dead or rotting flesh, or chemical waste, or are associated
with vermin, disease, or crawling things. They are not only quite dangerous
but they also make one’s skin creep.” Carroll thus suggests that the emo-
tion elicited by artistic works of horror—art-horror, in his neologism—is,
in fact, a compound emotion consisting of fear and disgust.23 Disgust, like
fear, is an evolved defense mechanism. Disgust evolved to protect organ-
isms from infection by pathogenic microorganisms,24 and has over evolu-
tionary time been co-opted by social cognition to enforce moral intuitions.
Disgust is elicited not just by cues of infection, such as the smell of decom-
posing flesh or the sight of sores oozing pus; it is elicited by gross viola-
tions of moral norms. The adaptive function of disgust is evident in the
facial expression universally associated with the emotion (even among the
congenitally blind),25 which serves to obstruct noxious odors and eject
offending matter from the mouth through curling of the lip, wrinkling of
the nose, and protrusion of the tongue. Horror monsters thus doubly
capitalize on evolved defense mechanisms when they are characterized as
dangerous and revolting, whether morally, physically, or both.
Horror, then, targets ancient, evolved mechanisms in the human cen-
tral nervous system.26 Lovecraft was right to suggest that the genre itself is
ancient; presumably, it arose with our species’ ability to produce imagina-
tive worlds. Although many horror scholars place the birth of the genre
with the publication of Horace Walpole’s Gothic romance The Castle of
Otranto in 1764, horror fiction is not the fortuitous invention of an eccen-
tric Englishman. Despite the number of horror scholars who claim that
the horror genre arose in response to the Enlightenment, neither is it
merely a by-product of a certain configuration of sociocultural concerns.27
As Poe grumbled in response to critics who accused his work of being
derivative of the German tradition, “terror is not of Germany, but of the
soul.”28 Lovecraft would agree (insofar as we accept “the soul” as short-
hand for the mind), and modern neuroscience also—horror, terror, fear,
anxiety, disgust, and awe are all evolved products of human nature.
Lovecraft’s own historical survey of supernatural horror in literature sug-
gests the deep ancestry of the genre. As he wrote: “Cosmic terror appears
as an ingredient of the earliest folklore of all races” (23). The assertion is
accurate enough. Cosmic terror, and stories designed to stimulate nega-
tive and ambivalent emotion more generally, does indeed appear in the
earliest folklore. Sacred texts such as the Bible have plenty of horror ele-
ments, from monsters to vivid depictions of demonic attacks on helpless
characters and corpses rising from graves—as the horror author Laird
Barron observed, the Bible and Necronomicon are “the greatest horror
stories ever told.”29 Folk superstition brims with terrifying elements such
50 M. CLASEN
as vampires, werewolves, and murderous ghosts. Folk tales frequently cen-

ter on predatory attacks and horrible monsters, and tales such as the orally
transmitted precursors of Beowulf are pre-literate monster horror stories.
The appeal of artworks that stimulate negative emotion lies partly in
their ability to satisfy morbid curiosity, our evolved curiosity about dan-
gerous situations and agents. But more broadly, such artworks appeal to
an evolved desire for vicarious experience, a desire to expand our experi-
ential horizons through imaginative activity.30 As the horror writer Peter
Straub has put it: “Horror stories are about engagement. About actual
experience, instead of simulated, false experience … it’s about discovering
one’s ability to feel in certain ways, and deepening and widening one’s
emotional experience by that means.”31 Horror stories allow us to imagi-
natively live through the worst, to confront danger vicariously and safely
gain experience with our own responses to danger. Horror stories let us
feel genuine fear, anxiety, terror, and so on, but at low risk and little cost.
They give us emotionally saturated experience with the very fringes of
human experience, and they let us discover and challenge our own limits.
Such stories can also traumatize us and hurt us profoundly, of course, but,
at their best, they function to widen our emotional and cognitive reper-
toire. Horror stories sensitize us to danger and to the darker aspects of
existence, they help us reflect on these aspects, and they may even prepare
us for confronting them in real life. Curiously, though, many of the mon-
strous agents and fictional scenarios depicted in horror fiction are far-
removed from the agents and scenarios encountered in real life. The
emotions elicited by horror are genuine, but the situations represented are
unlikely, implausible, or straight-out impossible. The genre brims with
supernatural content, which commands its own peculiar attraction.
“A Curious Streak of Fancy”: On Hyperactive

Agency Detection
[S]ometimes a curious streak of fancy invades an obscure corner of the very
hardest head; so that no amount of rationalisation, reform, or Freudian
analysis can quite annul the thrill of the chimney-corner whisper or the
lonely wood. There is here involved a psychological pattern or tradition as
real and as deeply grounded in mental experience as any other pattern or
tradition of mankind; coeval with the religious feeling and closely related to
many aspects of it, and too much a part of our inmost biological heritage to
lose keen potency over a very important, though not numerically great,
minority of our species … we need not wonder at the thoroughness with

which man’s very hereditary essence has become saturated with religion and
superstition. That saturation must, as a matter of plain scientific fact, be
regarded as virtually permanent so far as the subconscious mind and inner
instincts are concerned. (21)
Humans are natural-born scaredy-cats. As Lovecraft observed, we tend

to jump at shadows. And as Shakespeare had Theseus proclaim in A
Midsummer Night’s Dream, “in the night, imagining some fear, / How
easy is a bush supposed a bear!” How easy, indeed, when one is tossing
and turning in bed, trying to fall asleep, is a weird noise from somewhere
in one’s home supposed a cue suggesting the presence of some malevo-
lent, intruding agent. As researchers in the cognitive science of religion
have demonstrated, we humans are trip-wired for agency detection.32 We
are equipped with a cognitive mechanism dubbed a “Hyperactive Agency
Detection Device,” or HADD, by the scientist Justin Barrett.33 The evo-
lutionary logic underpinning this mechanism is that we are vastly better
off by acting on false positives than on false negatives, as mentioned in the
previous section, and this logic is encapsulated in the folk wisdom “better
safe than sorry.” Better to waste a little time and energy by mobilizing a
psychophysiological fear response in reaction to an unexpected noise than
to shrug and be eaten. Given the slightest cue, even a highly ambiguous
cue such as a rustling, people tend to assume the presence or proximity of
some intentional agent that may harm them, particularly in situations of
great uncertainty—when we are alone and thus particularly vulnerable to
assault, for example, or when we find ourselves in dark and/or unknown
environments, such as Lovecraft’s “lonely wood.” These are all recurrent
elements of horror fiction in which protagonists (or, in computer games,
the player’s avatar) find themselves alone in dark or labyrinthine surround-
ings, vulnerable and possibly preyed upon by some malicious agent whose
exact whereabouts are unknown.
Lovecraft’s claim that man’s “hereditary essence has become saturated
with religion and superstition” is by now massively corroborated by evi-
dence amassed by researchers in the cognitive science of religion.34 Belief
in supernatural agency comes naturally to us; atheism, agnosticism, and
scientific rationalism are, biologically speaking, “unnatural” and require
not just education and training, but hard mental work.35 Homo sapiens in
its natural state finds itself surrounded by supernatural agents and uncanny
causalities as a consequence of human psychological evolution. In the
52 M. CLASEN
absence of clear causal chains, we tend to presume an agent to be behind

an apparently inexplicable effect or an ambiguous environmental stimulus
such as movement or sound. Supernatural horror fiction exploits the con-
struction of the evolved HADD by positing imaginative universes in which
intentional, counterintuitive, often malicious agents produce material
effects—poltergeists wreaking havoc, ancient demons possessing innocent
girls, terrible revenants from beyond the grave. In supernatural horror
such as The Exorcist, the weird noise in the attic is not caused by the wind,
old boards creaking, or even rats—it is caused by an ancient demon. Many
horror stories prime the audience’s HADD by making the reality of their
monsters ambiguous, by shrouding them in fog, literal or ontological—is
there really a malicious agent out there, or not?
Enlightenment and widespread education have done little to eradicate
ghosts and demons from our imaginative universes. Because of our evolved
constitution, we are still susceptible to magical thinking—the well-
constructed ghost story can send a shiver down the spine of even the most
hard-headed skeptic, as Lovecraft suggested, as can an unexpected noise in
the dead of night. The “curious streak of fancy” that underpins supersti-
tion as well as the imaginative power of supernatural horror is rooted in
evolved defense mechanisms that have kept our ancestors alive in danger-
ous environments where the over-attribution of agency was the safer
course of action.
“A Vast Residuum of … Inherited Associations”:

Phobia and Monsters
[A] vast residuum of powerful inherited associations clings around all the
objects and processes that were once mysterious, however well they may
now be explained … there is an actual physiological fixation of the old
instincts in our nervous tissue, which would make them obscurely operative
even were the conscious mind to be purged of all sources of wonder. (22)
Evolution by natural selection equipped our species with a hyperactive

agency detection device and a hypersensitive fear system. Moreover, bio-
logical evolution built into our nature a narrow range of fear targets—
more specifically, phobia objects. Phobia objects are non-randomly
distributed and reflect objects and situations that were dangerous to our
evolutionary ancestors.36 Most such objects are remarkably underrepre-
sented in present-day mortality statistics in the industrialized world.
Common phobia objects include snakes, spiders, the dark, deep water,
heights, and confined spaces. We ought to be afraid of driving too fast
without a seatbelt or crash helmet, of power tools and slippery bathroom
floors, of saturated fats and cigarettes. But cars, motorcycles, buzz saws,
junk food, and the rest have not been around long enough to leave traces
in the human fear module. Snakes, spiders, the dark, deep water, heights,
and confined spaces, in contrast, have been around for millions of years,
insistently and incessantly hammering the fear module into adaptive
shape.37 Phobia objects reflect evolutionarily recurrent threats to human
fitness and so do those horror monsters that are supernormal embellish-
ments of dangerous animals—giant snakes and spiders, huge predators,
malevolent humans or human-like characters.38
It is not quite clear what Lovecraft meant by the “vast residuum of
powerful inherited association [that] cling around” certain objects and
processes. Presumably he had in mind such phenomena as thunder, which
in a prescientific understanding tends to be regarded with awe-struck hor-
ror and is imbued with intentionality—prescientific peoples presume some
intentional agent, such as a god, to be the cause of thunder. The god Thor
of Norse mythology is merely one example. Of course, thunder is now
very well understood as a shock wave produced when electrical dis-
charges—lightning—cause a violent expansion of air. Yet this phenome-
non retains its power to awaken atavistic fear in people, children especially.
Few are immune to the stirring of ancient emotion when a thunderstorm
rages across the land, no matter how well they understand the natural
processes underlying this phenomenon. That is why thunder and light-
ning have become stock elements, clichés, of horror—“it was a dark and
stormy night” indeed.
Human fears are rooted in human biology—fixated in our “nervous
tissue,” in Lovecraft’s phrase. So are fear-eliciting monsters and situations
in horror fiction. Research on fears and phobias supports Lovecraft’s claim
that evolutionarily ancient defense mechanisms—“instincts”—remain
“obscurely operative,” but there is nothing obscure about it once human
biological evolution is taken into account. These “instincts” are adaptive
mechanisms that evolved in response to the challenges and threats encoun-
tered by our ancestors over evolutionary time, and they are the mecha-
nisms that are targeted by the horror genre. Human fears and horror
monsters do exhibit some variation across individuals, cultures, and eras,
but that variation is constrained by human biology, distributed in a possi-
bility space dictated by human nature. People are hardwired to easily and
54 M. CLASEN
swiftly acquire fear of evolutionarily relevant objects and situations, and

horror fiction capitalizes on this construction by featuring depictions of
protagonists facing such objects and situations, often in embellished or
exaggerated versions.
“The Appeal … Is Generally Narrow”:

On the Audience for Weird and Horror
The appeal of the spectrally macabre is generally narrow because it demands
from the reader a certain degree of imagination and a capacity for detach-
ment from every-day life. (21)
When Lovecraft asserted that weird fiction appeals only to a small

minority of readers, he was building on anecdotal evidence—his own
occasionally painful experience of being largely overlooked or denigrated,
as well as the experiences of his fellow weird writers. But what do we
know, quantitatively, about the aficionados of weird fiction? Unfortunately,
very little. Weird fiction (including offspring such as the self-proclaimed
“new weird”) is still published, and still finds audiences (see John Glover’s
chapter in this book). The first season of the weird HBO television show
True Detective attracted about 3.5 million viewers at the season finale, a
number similar to the viewership attracted by another acclaimed HBO
show, the crime-drama series The Wire. On the other hand, Thomas
Ligotti, the author whose writings served as inspiration for True Detective,
is fairly unknown to the literary world at large. Lovecraft was probably
right; the weird holds little mainstream appeal, generally speaking. There
is no research that directly addresses Lovecraft’s assertion that a particu-
larly well-developed imagination correlates with a preference for weird
fiction, nor a “capacity for detachment from every-day life.” They are both
empirical assertions, hypotheses that can be investigated quantitatively,
with the aid of experimental methods. Yet for historical reasons, quantita-
tive, experimental research has never really gotten hold in most domains
of the humanities (with the exception of such overtly experimental disci-
plines as empirical aesthetics, as well as quasi-humanistic fields such as
media psychology). It is not the case that subjecting humanistic questions
to quantitative methodology is impossible or even impractical, but most
scholars and students in the humanities lack the tools, the knowledge, and
the imagination to import such methods into their toolkits.39 This may be
changing. In 2011, the scholarly journal Scientific Study of Literature was
established, and the International Society for the Empirical Study of

Literature and Media—the organization behind the journal—has been
steadily expanding since its inception in 1987. There are no epistemologi-
cal barriers keeping entrepreneurial scholars from investigating possible
correlations between a preference for the weird and “degree of
imagination.”
We do know something about the appeal of horror more broadly,
though.40 One ongoing study examines genre preference and personality
in a representative sample (n = 1072) of the North American population.41
Respondents were asked to indicate the degree to which they agreed with
the statement “I tend to enjoy horror media,” on a range from 1, indicat-
ing “Strongly disagree,” to 5, “Strongly agree.” Most of our respondents
answered in the affirmative; 54.5% indicate 4 or 5; 17% answer 3, 14.4%
answer 2, and only 14.2% answer 1. The majority of respondents, then, say
that they tend to enjoy horror media. It is a striking finding, confirming
that the paradox of horror is real—most people do in fact seek out enter-
tainment products designed to elicit negative emotion. The study also
finds a small gender difference in genre preference, with males reporting
slightly greater enjoyment of horror—and slightly higher frequency of
horror use—than females, as well as a slightly greater preference for more
frightening material. What explains this gender difference? Perhaps
women, on average, tend to respond more strongly to horror than males,
thus having a lower threshold for fiction-induced negative emotion.
Nobody wants to be terrified completely witless by a horror film, story, or
game. The emotional arousal produced by such entertainment has to be
kept in check and modulated by higher cognitive mechanisms with neural
underpinnings in the prefrontal cortex, otherwise people run screaming
from the movie theater or throw the book away. When we remind our-
selves or our co-viewers that “It’s just a film,” we are attempting to rein-
force prefrontal, neocortical dominance over those ancient defense
mechanisms that produce an aversive response. Experimental research has
documented that women, on average, are more sensitive to negative stim-
uli, showing “greater physiological defensive reactivity” in response to
“physically threatening scenes.”42 Cross-culturally, women experience fear
more frequently and more intensely than men. That may be why there
seem to be slightly fewer female horror fans than male horror fans. More
women than men find the emotional stimulation produced by horror
entertainment unpleasantly intense. Finally, the study suggests that there
are meaningful correlations between certain personality traits and horror
56 M. CLASEN
preference. Self-proclaimed horror fans tend to score relatively high on

the trait called “sensation-seeking,” which is perhaps not that surprising:
horror fans want to be stimulated. More surprising, perhaps, is the finding
that the single most predictive personality variable of horror liking (and
frequency of horror use) is a facet of the personality trait “Openness to
experience” known as “Intellect/Imagination.” It would appear, then,
that horror fans crave, and are particularly susceptible to, intellectual stim-
ulation. Whether fans of the weird score higher than “ordinary” horror
fans on “Intellect/Imagination” is an open question.
Much more research is needed on the audience of horror and weird
fiction. Lovecraft was probably right in his assertion that weird fiction has
a fairly narrow audience, but no empirical studies have looked into this.
Horror more broadly conceived, however, seems to be a majority taste. Of
course, different individuals may have different motivations for seeking
out horror. One study identified three basic types of horror film fans: The
“adrenaline-junkies,” thrill seekers who seek intense physiological stimula-
tion first and foremost; the “white-knucklers,” who respond strongly to
horror films yet seek out intense emotional stimulation and engagement;
and the “detectives,” who watch horror films primarily for intellectual
stimulation that allows them to double-guess plot developments.43
Different films may appeal to different types, and some individuals may
embody traits from several types or change motivation depending on con-
text. All the same, horror works by targeting evolved defense mechanisms.
Some horror primarily targets disease-avoidance mechanisms by featuring
plenty of disgusting content; other horror primarily targets more sophisti-
cated and specifically human cognitive adaptations in order to produce
existential terror and awe in its audience. The prototypical target emotion
for horror is fear, as Lovecraft pointed out, and judging by recent research,
the majority of people are willing, indeed eager, to seek out art and enter-
tainment constructed to produce a fear response in them.
Conclusion
Lovecraft built his poetics of horror on a wide-ranging understanding of
science and scholarship, as well as his own experience and intuitions.
Modern evolutionary social science converges with Lovecraft’s poetics and
provides an account of the biological mechanisms underpinning his obser-
vations. Even though social sciences and the humanities distanced them-
selves from the sciences of human nature for much of the twentieth
century, recent decades have seen a blossoming of integrative research and

scholarship that is overtly biocultural, research that answers to E. O.
Wilson’s call for “consilient” scholarship, that is, scholarship that takes
seriously humans as biological as well as cultural creatures.44 Humans
evolved like any other organism, and our evolutionary history is stamped
into our constitution—into our psychology no less than our anatomy.45
One major challenge for scholars eager to embrace the findings and tools
pouring out of consilient research on human nature is to avoid reinventing
the wheel—in other words, for evolutionarily minded humanities scholars
to rescue old insights from oblivion and to integrate these insights within
a scientific framework that is up-to-date.
I have argued that Lovecraft’s insights on horror and weird fictions are
eminently compatible with a modern, naturalistic poetics of horror—
indeed, that modern evolutionary social science encompasses Lovecraft’s
poetics and provides access to the mechanisms underpinning the genre.
Lovecraft, in a sense, gave us directions and told us where to look for the
mental cave system in which fictional monsters cavort. The evolutionary
social sciences—including evolutionary and cognitive psychology, cogni-
tive and affective neuroscience, biological anthropology and human
behavioral ecology—now give us a powerful flashlight for exploring those
subterranean caves.
Notes
1. H. P. Lovecraft, The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature, ed.
S. T. Joshi (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2000). Further citations from
this volume are indicated by in-text pagination.
2. Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (New York: Knopf,
1998); Jonathan Gottschall, “The Tree of Knowledge and Darwinian
Literary Study,” Philosophy and Literature 27, no. 2 (2003).
3. Joseph Carroll, Reading Human Nature: Literary Darwinism in Theory
and Practice (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 2011).
4. Jerrold E. Hogle and Andrew Smith, “Revisiting the Gothic and Theory:
An Introduction,” Gothic Studies 11, no. 1 (2009).
5. Paul R. Gross and N. Levitt, Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its
Quarrels with Science (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994);
Malcolm Macmillan, Freud Evaluated: The Completed Arc (Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, 1997); Richard Webster, Why Freud Was Wrong: Sin,
Science, and Psychoanalysis (New York, NY: BasicBooks, 1995); Joseph
Carroll et al., Graphing Jane Austen: The Evolutionary Basis of Literary
58 M. CLASEN
Meaning, Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance (Basingstoke:

Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
6. Douglas E. Winter, “Introduction,” in Prime Evil: New Stories by the
Masters of Modern Horror, ed. Douglas E. Winter (New York: New
American Library, 1988), 12.
7. Mathias Clasen, “Monsters Evolve: A Biocultural Approach to Horror
Stories,” Review of General Psychology 16, no. 2 (2012).
8. Joseph Carroll, “The Truth About Fiction: Biological Reality and
Imaginary Lives,” Style 46, no. 2 (2012).
9. Stephen T. Asma, “Monsters on the Brain: An Evolutionary Epistemology
of Horror,” Social Research: An International Quarterly 81, no. 4 (2015):
957.
10. H. Clark Barrett, “Adaptations to Predators and Prey,” in The Handbook of
Evolutionary Psychology, ed. David M. Buss (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley &
Sons Inc., 2005); David M. Buss, Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science
of the Mind, 4th ed. (Boston: Pearson Allyn & Bacon, 2012).
11. Rush W. Dozier, Fear Itself: The Origin and Nature of the Powerful Emotion
That Shapes Our Lives and Our World (New York: St. Martin’s Press,
1998).
12. Arne Öhman, “Fear and Anxiety: Overlaps and Dissociations,” in Handbook
of Emotions, ed. Michael Lewis, Jeannette M. Haviland-Jones, and Lisa
Feldman Barrett (New York: Guilford Press, 2008).
13. Arne Öhman and Susan Mineka, “Fears, Phobias, and Preparedness:
Toward an Evolved Module of Fear and Fear Learning,” Psychological
Review 108, no. 3 (2001).
14. Isaac M. Marks and Randolph M. Nesse, “Fear and Fitness: An Evolutionary
Analysis of Anxiety Disorders,” Ethology and Sociobiology 15, no. 5–6
(1994).
15. Noël Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror, or, Paradoxes of the Heart (New
York: Routledge, 1990).
16. H. P. Lovecraft, The Dream Cycle of H.P. Lovecraft: Dreams of Terror and
Death, 1st ed. (New York: Ballantine Books, 1995), 103–4.
17. SHL, p. 22.
18. Clasen, “Monsters Evolve: A Biocultural Approach to Horror Stories”;
Francis F. Steen and Stephanie A. Owens, “Evolution’s Pedagogy: An
Adaptationist Model of Pretense and Entertainment,” Journal of Cognition
and Culture 1, no. 4 (2001); John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, “Does
Beauty Build Adapted Minds? Toward an Evolutionary Theory of
Aesthetics, Fiction, and the Arts,” SubStance 30, no. 1&2 (2001).
19. Hans Kruuk, Hunter and Hunted: Relationships between Carnivores and
People (Cambridge, UK; New York, NY: Cambridge University Press,
2002), 177.
20. R. Nicholas Carleton, “Fear of the Unknown: One Fear to Rule Them
All?,” Journal of Anxiety Disorders Online ahead of print (2016),
doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.janxdis.2016.03.011.
21. David Swanger, “Shock and Awe: The Emotional Roots of Compound
Genres,” New York Review of Science Fiction 20, no. 5 (2008): 10.
22. Lovecraft, The Dream Cycle of H.P. Lovecraft: Dreams of Terror and Death,
103.
23. Carroll, Philosophy of Horror, 23, 28.
24. Val Curtis, Robert Aunger and Tamer Rabie, “Evidence that Disgust
Evolved to Protect from Risk of Disease,” Proceedings of the Royal Society
of London B: Biological Sciences, vol. 271 (2004).
25. Megan Oaten, Richard J. Stevenson and Trevor I. Case, “Disgust as a
Disease-Avoidance Mechanism,” Psychological Bulletin 135, no. 2 (2009).
26. Mathias Clasen, Why Horror Seduces (New York: Oxford University Press,
2017).
27. Mathias Clasen, “The Horror! The Horror!,” The Evolutionary Review 1,
no. 1 (2010).
28. Edgar Allan Poe and Julian Symons, Selected Tales, New paperback ed.,
The World’s Classics (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1980),
viii.
29. Laird Barron, “Why I Write: Laird Barron,” Publisher’s Weekly, July 12,
2010, http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/authors/inter-
views/article/43795-why-i-write-laird-barron.html.
30. Clasen, Why Horror Seduces.
31. Qtd. in Mathias Clasen, “A Conversation with Peter Straub,” Cemetery
Dance, no. 61 (2009): 40.
32. Scott Atran and Ara Norenzayan, “Religion’s Evolutionary Landscape:
Counterintuition, Commitment, Compassion, Communion,” Behavioral
and Brain Sciences 27, no. 6 (2004).
33. Justin L. Barrett, Why Would Anyone Believe in God?, Cognitive Science of
Religion Series (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2004).
34. Jesper Sørensen, “Religion in Mind: A Review Article of the Cognitive
Science of Religion,” Numen 52 (2005).
35. Pascal Boyer, Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious
Thought (New York: Basic Books, 2001).
36. Marks and Nesse, “Fear and Fitness: An Evolutionary Analysis of Anxiety
Disorders.”
37. Dozier, Fear Itself: The Origin and Nature of the Powerful Emotion That
Shapes Our Lives and Our World; Martin E. P. Seligman, “Phobias and
Preparedness,” Behavior Therapy 2, no. 3 (1971).
38. Clasen, “The Horror! The Horror!”
60 M. CLASEN
39. Jonathan Gottschall, “Literature, Science, and a New Humanities,” in

Evolution, Literature, and Film: A Reader, ed. Brian Boyd, Joseph Carroll,
and Jonathan Gottschall (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).
40. See also James B. Weaver, III and Ron Tamborini, ed. Horror Films:
Current Research on Audience Preferences and Reactions (New Jersey:
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., 1996).
41. Mathias Clasen, Jens Kjeldgaard-Christiansen and John A. Johnson,
“Horror, Personality, and Threat Simulation: A Survey of the Psychology
of Scary Media” (under submission).
42. Catharine Cross and Anne Campbell, “Women’s Aggression,” Aggression
and Violent Behavior 16, no. 5 (2011): 392.
43. Tom Robinson, Clark Callahan, and Keith Evans, “Why Do We Keep
Going Back? A Q Method Analysis of Our Attraction to Horror Movies,”
Operant Subjectivity 37, no. 1/2 (2014).
44. Joseph Carroll et al., “Biocultural Theory: The Current State of
Knowledge,” Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences Online ahead of print
(2015), doi: https://doi.org/10.1037/ebs0000058.
45. Buss, Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind.
CHAPTER 4
Ansky’s The Dybbuk, Freud’s Future

of an Illusion, Watson’s “Little Albert,”
and Supernatural Horror in Literature
Sharon Packer
Introduction
H. P. Lovecraft is an unlikely advocate for Jewish tradition, given his well-
documented anti-Semitism and his overall racist attitudes. Yet Lovecraft’s
100-page essay Supernatural Horror in Literature (SHL)—first published
in 1927, revised between 1933 and 1934, and in print to this day—
applauds the Jewish mystical imagination. SHL names S. Ansky’s super-
natural drama, The Dybbuk, as one of two outstanding examples of
supernatural horror scripted by Jewish authors. Yet his seeming commen-
dation can also be construed as a backhanded compliment, given the lowly
status accorded to shtetl folk tales and Jewish mystical beliefs by the Jewish
intelligentsia at the time that Lovecraft wrote SHL (published in the same
year as Freud’s influential anti-religion essay, The Future of an Illusion).
The Dybbuk drama revolves around the concept of “metempsychosis,”
which refers to the transmigration of souls from one body to another body
after death. Metempsychosis was a well-established and recurring meme
S. Packer (*)
Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Icahn School of Medicine at
Mount Sinai, New York, NY, USA

62 S. PACKER
that harps back to Pythagoras and his teacher. It was popularized by Plato
long, long before it permeated Jewish mystical belief systems and claimed
center stage in Ansky’s play. In The Dybbuk, this metempsychosis causes
behavior aberrations that mimic psychosis, which is then “cured” via ritual
exorcism performed by a specially skilled rabbi known as a baal shem.
Ansky’s The Dybbuk premiered on the American stage in 1925; SHL
was published two years later, during a period when important new para-
digms in psychiatry, psychology, psychoanalysis, and even neuropsychiatry
were either emerging or gaining ground. Besides being a tragic love story,
The Dybbuk’s central theme revolves around psychological issues, even
though its folkloric explanations for bizarre behavior changes are super-
natural rather than scientific (or pseudo-scientific, as may be the case for
psychoanalysis). Moreover, the role of the spiritual healer, or baal shem,
recollects the seemingly magical cures promised by psychoanalysts such as
Freud and Jung, who were attracting wider audiences when Lovecraft
penned this famed essay. So full appreciation of The Dybbuk drama demands
awareness of psychiatric theories as well as the “literature” referenced in
the title of SHL.
Psychology and Psychologists in Lovecraft’s

Writings
Lovecraft’s impressive fund of information did not start or stop with litera-
ture, even though his formal education was limited. He was conversant
with contemporary psychological theories and applied them to his analysis
of horror literature. His letters confirm his familiarity with behaviorists
such as Watson and Pavlov and with behaviorism in general. He alludes to
psychoanalysts such as Freud, Jung, and Adler, and mentions many other
cutting-edge thinkers of the day.
Throughout SHL, Lovecraft speaks freely of “psychology,” suggesting
that the term was part of his everyday parlance. Lovecraft’s opening para-
graph in SHL alludes to psychology, not surprisingly, given its cultural
currency as well as its relevance to Lovecraft’s own family background. In
the same essay in which he catalogues the best of supernatural horror,
Lovecraft lauds several psychologists. He stresses the primacy of “fear” as
a driving force in human behavior, averring that “the oldest and strongest
emotion of mankind is fear” (21). To fortify his conclusions, and as testi-
mony to his respect for psychological insights, he then states, “These facts
few psychologists will dispute.”
ANSKY’S THE DYBBUK, FREUD’S FUTURE OF AN ILLUSION… 63
Several pages after his opening statement, Lovecraft opines, “no amount
of rationalisation, reform, or Freudian analysis can quite annul the thrill of
the chimney-corner whisper or the lonely wood. There is here involved a
psychological pattern or tradition as real and as deeply grounded in mental
experience as any other pattern or tradition of mankind” (22). Lovecraft
hints at the existence of different currents in psychology when he says that
“this type of fear-literature must not be confounded with a type externally
similar but psychologically widely different; the literature of mere physical
fear and the mundanely gruesome.” Lovecraft distinguishes purely mental
fear from fear of bodily harm. He also implies that psychoanalytically
acquired insight cannot override these primal emotional reactions.
We can find Freudian inspiration in Lovecraft’s efforts to plumb the
psychological appeal of horror and the uncanny, for Freud wrote a well-
received and related essay about The Uncanny in 1919.1 That essay was
first published in Imago in 1919 and translated by Alix Strachey. Lovecraft
repeatedly uses the word “uncanny” in his own essay but does not credit
the German-speaking Freud for this term (translated from the German
unheimlich). Yet Freud was no friend of the irrational, the religious, or the
superstitious, even if he was intrigued by these processes and studied reli-
gious rituals and belief systems to aid his understanding of psychopathol-
ogy. Lovecraft shared Freud’s irreverence toward religion.
Freud’s 1927 essay, The Future of an Illusion, denounced religion and
linked supernaturalism to an infantile need for an all-nurturing, omnipres-
ent mother, among other things. Freud promoted his “discovery” of psy-
choanalysis as a form of “scientific psychology,” but contemporary critics
view psychoanalysis as unscientific, with little to no grounding in fact,
riddled with inaccurate information and subject to flights of imagination.
Freudians who follow Freud’s theories with religious devotion are derided
as “The Cult of St. Sigmund.” Freud’s speculative psychoanalysis—which
seemed poised to supplant supernatural explanations for strange behavior—
now seems closer to superstition than science.
Some speculate that Freud’s The Future of an Illusion was an effort to
dissociate himself from religious sectarianism, and from his own Jewish
religious heritage, for he feared early on that his fledging psychoanalysis
would be dismissed as a Jewish phenomenon because most of his early fol-
lowers were Jewish. (Carl Jung, the son of a Zwingli Protestant minister,
was a significant exception.) Whether or not this was Freud’s intent is
unclear, but such efforts were not enough; the Nazis condemned psycho-
analysis as “Jewish science,” burned Freud’s books in 1933, and banished
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Jews from the German Committee on Medical Psychology (before exiling

or exterminating the rest).
Apart from any allusions to Freud or other psychologists, Lovecraft lists
“abnormal psychology” as one of three strains of “weird literature.” The
allusions to psychology that pepper SHL gain special prominence in his
chapter about Poe, whom he praises and portrays as a “literary psycholo-
gist.” Lovecraft states, “Before Poe the bulk of the weird writers had
worked largely in the dark; without an understanding of the psychological
basis of the horror appeal” (42). By saluting Poe’s intuitive understanding
of psychology, Lovecraft reifies the significance of his own approaches to
the psychology of fear, since Lovecraft himself was as much a horror writer
as a scholar.
Perhaps Poe’s ability to dramatize the “hereditary degeneration” of the
Usher clan added to Poe’s appeal to Lovecraft and convinced Lovecraft of
Poe’s insight into psychology. For the fictional Usher family’s fate bears
uncanny parallels to Lovecraft’s own life experiences. Witnessing his par-
ents’ psychoses may have kindled fears of succumbing to the mental afflic-
tions that plagued each parent. Both Lovecraft’s father and his mother
died in asylums, although each was committed separately, many years
apart. Lovecraft’s father entered Butler Hospital when Lovecraft was three
(in the year 1893). His mother was sent to the same institution 21 years
later. Although syphilis had been known by many names for centuries, the
infectious organism responsible for general paresis of the insane, or neuro-
syphilis or tertiary syphilis—Treponema pallidum—was not definitively
identified in the laboratory until 1913. As a result, many cases of tertiary
syphilis were misclassified as “hereditary degeneration” and belief in famil-
ial transmission of this illness prevailed far longer than warranted.
The cause of Lovecraft’s mother’s mental deterioration was never
determined, suggesting that an impressionable and inquisitive and creative
young mind might strive to understand the causes of his family’s psycho-
logical curse. Even if he could not understand it or reverse it, he surely
succeeded in sublimating his experiences and transmuting such horrors
into horrific literature. Despite the many references to psychologists and
psychology, the name of Julius Wagner-Jauregg does not appear in SHL,
even though the experiments of this Austrian psychiatrist and future Nobel
Laureate arguably had the most relevance to Lovecraft’s personal family
history. Also an Austrian and thereby a compatriot of Freud, Wagner-
Jauregg earned his 1927 Nobel for his “discovery of … malaria inocula-
tion [fever therapy] in the treatment of dementia paralytica [‘general
paresis of the insane’].” That disease killed Lovecraft’s father, after leaving
the elder Lovecraft catatonic, condemned to live the remainder of his
abbreviated life in an asylum. It is an eerie coincidence—but nothing more
than a coincidence—that SHL went to press in the same year that Wagner-
Jauregg’s discovery earned everlasting fame via the Nobel Prize—although
Wagner-Jauregg published his results in medical journals a decade earlier
and his findings were already appreciated by the medical community.2
Watson, Pavlov, Freud, Jung, and Lovecraft

Lovecraft mentions Freud in his 1927 essay, but he also references the
controversial American behaviorist John Watson twice as often as he refer-
ences Freud. Although literary critics are far more likely to focus on Freud,
Lovecraft had good reason for his intrigue with Watson, his motives, and
his legacy. Psychologist John B. Watson’s research into classical behavioral
conditioning overlapped with Lovecraft’s goals far more than Freudian
theories, since both Watson and Lovecraft identified the same endpoint:
the induction of fear. As a horror writer, Lovecraft crafted his literary work
to evoke fear. Like Watson, Lovecraft sensed that fear can be conditioned
in otherwise ordinary people (or in infants, as in the case of Watson’s
unfortunate test subject, Little Albert), but Lovecraft admitted that only
those of a certain sensibility would voluntarily seek out such horrific sensa-
tions, via weird literature.3 In contrast, Freud attributed fears and phobias
to sexually charged childhood experiences and perceptions but also pos-
ited the existence of supposedly universal fears, such as fear of castration.
Watson drew on Ivan Pavlov’s Nobel Prize-winning work about classi-
cal conditioning. The Russian physiologist Pavlov paved new paths in
physiology as well as psychology when he proved that seemingly reflexive
physiological functions can be trained to occur in response to external
stimuli unrelated to the original physiological stimulus. Knowing that
dogs salivate in the presence of meat, Pavlov conditioned canines to sali-
vate at the sound of a bell played while they were fed, even when no food
was present. In contrast to Pavlov’s animal experimentation, Watson
proved the power of “classical conditioning” by inducing phobias in an
otherwise ordinary human infant known only as Little Albert.
Watson observed Little Albert play with a white mouse, which Albert
enjoyed without signs of fear. Then Watson added a noxious noise when
Albert saw the furry little white rodent. Watson strived to put his toddler-
subject in a state of persistent fear, so that he (Watson) could observe how
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the initial terror fossilizes into a “phobia” and then “generalizes” to stim-
uli that share superficial similarities to the original fear-provoking object.
Watson’s research into the genesis of human fear paralleled Lovecraft’s
goals (and perhaps contradicted Lovecraft’s contention that “fear of the
unknown” is the greatest of all fears). Yet Lovecraft comes off as a soft-
core sadist at most, bested by this science-minded experimental psycholo-
gist who sacrificed the well-being of his human subject for the sake of his
scientific studies.
In the aftermath of this experiment, Little Albert was left fearful not
just of white rats, a laboratory staple, but of the white-bearded Santa Claus
and furry white bunny rabbits—an Easter celebration staple. This induced
“phobia” went well beyond Pavlovian “avoidance.” By all accounts, Albert
became an anxious little boy, although his mental state may have been
compromised already.
It is easy to see how Watson’s behaviorist experiments riffed on Freudian
theories of psychosexual determinism, and refuted fanciful psychoanalytic
explanations based on myth rather than scientific study. Freud’s writings
about Little Hans’ horse phobia exemplify his speculative approach. Freud
theorized about the origins of Hans’ preexisting phobia and based his
now-disputed “insights” on descriptive letters send by Hans’ father, rather
than direct observation. Freud’s elegant writing was persuasive, but his
paper eventually came under attack for lack of experimental evidence. Yet
for all of Freud’s scientific shortcomings, we cannot lose sight of the fact
that Freud merely hypothesized about the origins of a phobia in hindsight,
whereas Watson set out to instill a phobia in real life.
Watson’s findings have not been disputed by the scientific community—
but his scientific scruples are much-disputed and patently shocking by
today’s standards (and even run afoul of the Nuremberg Laws enacted in
response to horrific Nazi medical experiments and war crimes). Watson’s
landmark experiments in behavioral conditioning and learned fear, pub-
lished in 1920, remain scientifically valid, but the techniques used to
induce an artificial phobia in “Little Albert” now seem closer to horror
stories than to scientific studies. Yet Watson followed accepted protocols
of research at the time. Lovecraft had good reason to evoke Watson’s
name even more often than Freud’s.4
In addition to allusions to Freud, Adler, Watson, and Pavlov, Lovecraft
mentions C. G. Jung by name and occasionally cites controversial ideas
espoused by Jung, even if he does not credit Jung directly. Jung was
Freud’s one-time heir apparent but the two later parted ways in 1913.
Jung himself was an occultist who employed ideas from alchemy, the
i-Ching, Gnosticism, and more and denied the need for scientific confir-
mation of such theories. Although he was a Swiss national and not a
German citizen, Jung eventually chaired the Nazi-controlled German
Committee for Medical Psychology after the ouster of all Jewish members.
Oddly enough, Jung expressed admiration for Jewish mystical ideas, even
though he denounced Jewish culture in general and claimed that Jews
parasitized other cultures. Jung’s appreciation for the occult contributed
to his estrangement from his mentor and father figure, Freud.
Lovecraft, Literature, and the Hypothetical

“Racial Unconscious”
Lovecraft’s 100-page critique in SHL acknowledges the individual’s liter-
ary prowess (or lack of it) in creating a given work of fiction but he simul-
taneously credits each author’s national imagination, as if to endorse Carl
Jung’s hypothetical and highly controversial concept of an inheritable
“racial unconscious.” Jung believed that inheritable behavioral, emotional,
and cognitive styles and strengths vary from race to race, from ethnicity to
ethnicity, and from nation to nation.
Jung also posited the existence of a “collective unconscious” that trans-
mits universal symbols and archetypes to all humankind. Lovecraft’s refer-
ences to dybbuks and golems as “fixed types” in Jewish literature may be
read as synonyms for Jungian-style “archetypes.” Lovecraft’s SHL arrived
far too early to reference Jung’s best-remembered works on archetypes
and symbols, such as the lavishly illustrated Man & his Symbols, begun
shortly before Jung’s death in 1961 but published posthumously in 1964,
with Marie-Louise von Franz writing four of five parts.
Freud objected to these Jungian concepts—and to Jung’s preoccupa-
tion with the occult—but it was that Jungian concept of the “racial uncon-
scious” that caused even more controversy, even though Lovecraft voiced
like-minded ideas. Soon enough, similar ideas would be endorsed by the
Nazis,5 who officially came to power in 1933, but whose ideas had been
percolating, if not boiling over, during the years when Lovecraft wrote
SHL. The concept of a racial unconscious would be dismissed—even
abhorred—by many more, partly because of its association with Nazism,
social Darwinism, “racial hygiene,” and the genocide that resulted. Other
theoreticians and behavioral scientists objected to the existence of an
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immutable (and still unprovable) biological basis for behavior and intelli-
gence.6 Subsequent scholarship shows how Jung’s work incorporated pre-
existing Romantic and volkish ideas about race and picked up on the tenor
of his own times.7
To find examples of Lovecraft’s beliefs about nationally, ethnically or
racially inherited talents or proclivities, we can turn to Lovecraft’s pro-
nouncements about French weird literature. Lovecraft concludes that “the
French genius is more naturally suited to this dark realism than to the sug-
gestion of the unseen; since the latter process requires, for its best and
most sympathetic development on a large scale, the inherent mysticism of
the Northern mind” (41).
Immediately after paying homage to the “French genius” (and, by
implication, the “Northern mind”), Lovecraft praises specific Jewish cre-
ations. Because this essay focuses on The Dybbuk and Jewish mysticism,
and the psychological implications of dybbuk possession and exorcism, it
may appear that Lovecraft accorded extra (or even equal) weight to Jewish
literature (41). But that is simply not so. Lovecraft embeds his conclusions
about Jewish weird literature and drama in a single paragraph on half a
page, which literally amounts to less than 1% of Lovecraft’s 100-page
essay.8 In other words, this topic may be important to the author of this
essay, but it may have been little more than an afterthought of equivocal
significance for the author of SHL. Regardless, let us examine Lovecraft’s
opinions.
Lovecraft states,
A very flourishing, though till recently quite hidden, branch of weird litera-
ture is that of the Jews, kept alive and nourished in obscurity by the sombre
heritage of early Eastern magic, apocalyptic literature, and cabbalism. The
Semitic mind, like the Celtic and Teutonic, seems to possess marked mysti-
cal inclinations; and the wealth of underground horror-lore surviving in
ghettoes and synagogues must be much more considerable than is generally
imagined. (41)
Lovecraft continues:
Cabbalism itself, so prominent during the Middle Ages, is a system of phi-

losophy explaining the universe as emanations of the Deity, and involving
the existence of strange spiritual realms and beings apart from the visible
world, of which dark glimpses may be obtained through certain secret
incantations. Its ritual is bound up with mystical interpretations of the Old
Testament, and attributes an esoteric significance to each letter of the

Hebrew alphabet—a circumstance which has imparted to Hebrew letters a
sort of spectral glamour and potency in the popular literature of magic. (41)
In the same paragraph, Lovecraft writes,
Jewish folklore has preserved much of the terror and mystery of the past,
and when more thoroughly studied is likely to exert considerable influence
on weird fiction. The best examples of its literary use so far are the German
novel The Golem, by Gustav Meyrink, and the drama The Dybbuk, by the
Jewish writer using the pseudonym “Ansky” … The Dybbuk, translated and
produced in America in 1925, and more recently produced as an opera,
describes with singular power the possession of a living body by the evil soul
of a dead man. Both golems and dybbuks are fixed types, and serve as fre-
quent ingredients of later Jewish tradition. (41)
Conveniently, Ansky’s collected writings appeared in English in 1926,

just before Lovecraft penned his now-famous and much-quoted chronicle
of supernatural horror literature. Lovecraft did not live to witness the true
immortality of The Dybbuk, for Ansky’s dramatic creation has enjoyed
many incarnations in varied art forms. The Dybbuk lives on, not just in
opera, as mentioned by Lovecraft, but also in ballet, puppetry, film, and
drama. The Dybbuk story endures to this day, as atavistic as it is. In con-
trast, the seemingly cutting-edge “scientific psychology” touted by
Sigmund Freud now seems closer to the superstition that he derided, far
removed from contemporary “evidence-based” medical science.
Ansky’s The Dybbuk: How It Came to Be

Ansky’s often-retold drama may prove to be as immortal as its subject mat-
ter. The Dybbuk tale has survived and thrived for nearly a century and still
seems to be going strong. Scholem Ansky’s name is not as well-known as
the name of Scholem Aleichem, another Russian-Jewish man of letters
who wrote Tevya and His Five Daughters. Tevya is better remembered in
America for its musical adaptation, Fiddler on the Roof. Scholem Aleichem’s
Yiddish stories were celebrated in both Czarist and Soviet Russia. The
Soviets saw the universal in Aleichem’s stories. In contrast, the Communists
outlawed The Dybbuk and other Yiddish literature, deeming this genre as
too parochial and particularistic.
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Specifically, Scholem Aleichem’s character, Tevya the Dairyman, lives

in the real world of pogrom-ridden Russia, and grapples with Cossacks
and Proto-Communists. Tevya confronts real-world demons such as
urbanization, migration, industrialization, and modernization. On the
contrary, Channon and Leah—the protagonists of Ansky’s play—inhabit
an unreal realm of magic and mysticism. That world was once as real to
the Jewish imagination as Trotsky and Bakunin, Marx, Lenin, and Stalin.
Scholem Aleichem’s Tevya adapts to social, economic, and political
change, and moves forward, while Ansky’s fictional characters retreat
deep into Jewish tradition. When stressed, Ansky’s protagonists turn to
the Kaballah (Cabala) and fantastic Jewish folk tales. Ansky himself took a
different, more circuitous route, leaving the shtetl to spend time in the
literary salons of Paris—and to work and organize labor in the coal mines
of Russia—before returning to his insular shtetl roots. Thanks to the lar-
gesse of a Jewish philanthropist who wanted to preserve unrecorded tra-
ditions before they faded from memory in a changing world, Ansky began
an ethnographic expedition in the Jewish Pale of Settlement, collecting
folkloric stories, artifacts, and amulets. His Dybbuk drama emerged from
those studies.
The Dybbuk is set in a turn-of-the-nineteenth century Polish shtetl,
where Jews crowded together in a small self-governing town, to live apart
from surrounding Gentiles and to maintain their traditional ways. This
was a world where good and evil spirits supposedly co-existed, along with
exorcists, shamans, and herbal healers, baali shem (literally: possessors of
the “good name”). To work wonders, they could call upon the Jewish
Jehovah, identified only as “The Name” (literally, “Ha-Shem”). The
founder of Chasidism was known as the Baal Shem Tov, meaning that he
was the best of the baali shem (or, perhaps, that he invoked only the good
Name, and did not dabble with evil spirits or demonic forces). (“Tov”
translates as “good.”)
That Jewish mystical sect thrived and survived to this day and spread
across all continents. Those baali shem, including the founder of Chasidism,
also distributed amulets and offered medicinal plants from forest and field.
These spiritual practitioners accessed psychoactive herbs, weeds, and
mushrooms that grew wild in Russia and performed some of the same
social and medical functions that psychiatrists and psychopharmacologists
provide in contemporary North and South American culture. Those baali
shem can be considered as counterparts to South, Central, and Native
American shamans. In those years and in those locales, shtetl dwellers
believed that dybbuks and demons could attack susceptible souls and
induce odd actions and attitudes. Even their mystically minded non-Jewish
Russian compatriots harbored similar superstitious beliefs about the source
of behavior changes.
The Dybbuk: The Drama and the Many Lives It Lived

The Dybbuk’s tragic story revolves around Channon, the poor yeshiva
scholar, and Leah, the rich man’s daughter, betrothed to one another
before their births by their overly optimistic fathers. A mysterious stranger
warned the fathers against making such vows for the unborn, but his
advice went unheeded and the betrothal proceeded. Years later, the fami-
lies part ways, and the two children grow up in different towns, unaware
of their fathers’ vows. Yet the mysterious power of this vow causes Channon
and Leah to cross paths once they come of marriageable age. They become
enchanted with one another.
By this time, Leah’s father has become financially successful and socially
striving, hoping to make a better match for his daughter than he once
expected so many years earlier. He disregards his vow and arranges a mar-
riage between his daughter and an affluent but unappealing suitor.
Knowing that marriage negotiations for his beloved are under way,
Channon does what he can to forestall fate. He attempts to win back his
intended via sorcery and kabbalistic incantations—despite strict religious
admonitions against dabbling in Kabbalah or employing sorcery.
Channon’s efforts prove fruitless. Leah’s pleadings with her father fare
no better. The marriage date is set. When Channon learns of these plans,
he commits suicide. Suicide is strictly forbidden by Jewish law, so much so
that persons who commit suicide cannot be buried within the Jewish cem-
etery proper and their remains must lie outside, forever distanced from
family, friends, and the co-religionists and unworthy of the Judaic “the
world to come.”
So, Channon’s disembodied soul becomes a “dybbuk” that hovers
between two worlds, unable to enter paradise because of his sinful sui-
cide, and unable to partake in this-worldly life because he is no longer
alive. He becomes a “cleaving spirit” that must attach itself to a living
host, in somewhat the same way as a microorganism that parasitizes
bigger bodies to survive. So, his dybbuk enters Leah and possesses her
and causes her to speak strangely, utter blasphemies, and behave in
uncharacteristic ways, much like Linda Blair in The Exorcist (1973). A
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contemporary psychiatrist would consider this behavior to be a mani-

festation of psychosis, or perhaps a more temporary stress-induced dis-
sociative disorder, but the concept of possession would not be part of
most psychiatrists’ “differential diagnosis.”
While in this dissociative state, Leah is unaware of the fate of her suitor,
her “bashert” (intended), but her father remains grounded in reality—or
at least in the culturally determined reality of the time and place. Father
recognizes that his daughter is possessed by a dybbuk that must be exor-
cised before her marriage can be completed. The father summons a baal
shem to perform this magical faith healing. The baal shem succeeds in free-
ing Leah from the dybbuk, but Leah collapses and dies from the stress. The
tragic tale ends bitterly, with the rabbi prescribing acts of penance, charity,
and remembrance for Leah’s father. These are likely reasons why Lovecraft,
who disdained love stories where all ends well, thought so highly of it.
The Dybbuk was intended for stage, and was first performed in Vilna,
Lithuania, to commentate Ansky’s untimely death. Ansky himself never
witnessed this honor. The Hebrew language Habima Theater version of
The Dybbuk premiered in 1922, in Moscow, a few years before the intro-
duction of talkies in 1926. Two direct film adaptations followed, one enti-
tled The Dybbuk (dir.: Michael Waszynski, 1937). Another film was retitled
The Vow (dir.: Henryk Szaro, 1937), in recognition of the pivotal role
played by the father’s broken vow. The Vow was one of the last Yiddish
films made in pre-World War II Poland, before the once-vibrant Polish-
Jewish communities were decimated by the Holocaust.
In the silent cinema, histrionic gestures and excessive expressions function
as “psychic acoustics” and substitute for the spoken word—and this maudlin
story of lost love and lost lives benefited from the “psychic acoustics” of
silent cinema. The overdone emoting surpassed words alone and negated the
need for sub-titles, which were included in Polish and Yiddish just the same.
Given Lovecraft’s predilection for malevolent forces, as catalogued in
SHL, his appreciation of a tale that celebrates the dark and demonic power
of the dybbuk makes perfect sense. His chapter on “The Apex of Gothic
Romance” applauds “horror in literature [that] attains a new malignity in
the novels of Matthew Gregory Lewis” (author of The Monk). In a later
chapter on Poe, Lovecraft praises Poe’s “convincing malignity.” It seems
fitting that Lovecraft would be equally enthralled by Ansky’s dybbuk,
which overpowers whomever it possesses, inducing suicide and psychosis,
and foreshadowing the unspeakable horrors experienced by various
Lovecraftian characters.
Conclusion
In the end, we find that the compliment Lovecraft paid to the Jewish mys-
tical sensibility in SHL was a backhanded one at best and could be con-
strued as an indirect insult. As mentioned, SHL was first published in 1927,
the same year that saw the publication of Freud’s much-discussed anti-
religion essay on The Future of an Illusion (1927). At that time, almost all
Western Jewish scholars dismissed the importance of mysticism in Jewish
tradition. The more scientifically minded and secularly educated Jews of
Western Europe distanced themselves from this heritage. German-speaking
Jews were mildly to immensely embarrassed by the superstitious lore
adored by their less sophisticated and often impoverished co-religionists
who lived to the East (Ostjuden). Freud was among those German-speaking
Jews, although he was born in Galicia and spent early years (and later sum-
mers) with the local Ostjuden and his Chasidic cousins.9
Then Gershom Scholem’s scholarship turned the tables. The task of
unearthing this mystical strain in Judaism became the life calling of Berlin-
born Scholem, who left his assimilated German-Jewish family and immi-
grated to Jerusalem, where he initially worked as a librarian, and eventually
chaired Hebrew University’s first department of Jewish mysticism.10
Scholem is best remembered for his collected lectures, Major Trends in
Jewish Mysticism, first published in 1941,11 but his research and his writings
extended far beyond the basics and have intrigued devoted scholars and
intellectually inclined Jews ever since. His speeches and essays, published as
On Kabbalah and its Symbolism in 1965,12 disseminated knowledge of
Jewish mysticism among non-Jews. Although Scholem published academic
papers before 1941, it is safe to say that his wisdom was not widely known
before then, and that Lovecraft’s decision to emphasize Jews’ “mystical
inclinations” was not a way to express admiration at the time his essay was
written. Those reading Lovecraft’s essay today, in the aftermath of Scholem’s
overpowering influence, may interpret Lovecraft’s praise very differently
from readers who came across this essay in 1927, 1933, or even 1941.
Notes
1. Freud wrote his 1919 essay on The Uncanny (USA: Penguin Classics,
2003) in German and used the term “unhemlich,” which literally means,
“un-homey.” This term was loosely translated into English as “uncanny.”
2. Although he was a Nobel Laureate who made several important scientific
contributions to biological psychiatry, Wagner-Jauregg was not an
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unequivocally admirable character. He was one of several psychiatrists tried

for brutal treatments of hysterical soldiers during the Great War. He
became the namesake of a military inquisition known as “The Wagner-
Jauregg Trial.” He was also known as a Nazi sympathizer who supported
eugenics to promote a purer population.
3. Lovecraft’s interest in Watson’s work makes us wonder if he attributed his
personal intrigue with fear to the events that occurred later in his own
life—such as the institutionalization of his parents or perhaps the bizarre
behavior that prompted their admission to an asylum.
4. My thanks to Sean Moreland for supplying quotes from Lovecraft’s letters,
excerpted from H.P. Lovecraft, Selected Letters Volume III (Sauk City:
Arkham House, 1971). The following quotes confirm Lovecraft’s aware-
ness of both Freud and Watson, and suggest that he considered Watson’s
contribution to psychology to be as significant as Freud’s psychoanalytic
theories: SL 3, 134, “Since the pioneering work of Freud & the still more
analytical work of his successors—Pavlov, Jung, Adler, Watson &c […] we
have come to see that there is no such thing as ‘love’ in any unified, perma-
nent, or important sense. SL 3, 146: “This ‘love’ business is pretty well
disposed of by the psycho-analysts—Freud, Jung, Adler,—& the behav-
iourists of Dr. John B. Watson’s school.” SL 3, 223: “Thus with the con-
clusions of Jeans—which we must correlate with Millikan, Compton,
Eddington, Shapley, Freud, Watson, Russell, Frazer, Einstein, Eddington,
Santayana, Keith, and dozens of others before they can have even the least
definitive evidential value.” SL 3, 241: “Such things as ‘wonder,’ ‘glory’,
&c. are merely subjective reactions of the nervous system of a particular
kind of organisation, & the newer psychology of Freud, Adler, Watson,
Pavlov &c has caused these reactions to be very well understood. It is
merely a vestige of primitive ignorance to supply the idea of conscious
personality & purpose to the eternal & impersonal congeries of regular
forces & motion patterns which forms the totality of entity.”
5. Geoffrey Cock’s historical book, Psychotherapy in the Third Reich: The
Goering Institute (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press Chicago, 1985)
remains the leading source on Jung’s role in displacing Jewish psychoana-
lysts and the Jewish committee chair from the Nazi-run German Committee
for Medical Psychology. Jung subsequently rationalized his acceptance of
this dubious honor but never fully explained why he, as a Swiss citizen, felt
compelled to participate in this German-led endeavor.
6. Jungian “depth psychology” was eliminated from most medical school
curricula and psychiatric residency training programs long before the
reigning Freudian ideology fell into disrepute in the mid-1980s, although
Jung retained strong adherents in circumscribed circles and Jung’s books
about psychology remained the best-selling psychology books among the
public.
7. Richard Noll, The Jung Cult. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997) offers
a detailed and dispassionate exploration of the historical as well as philo-
sophical underpinnings of Jung’s supposedly “unique” ideas.
8. H.P. Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror in Literature, http://www.hplove-
craft.com/writings/texts/essays/shil.aspx. Accessed August 7, 2018.
9. Many scholars have focused on Freud’s complicated relationship with
Judaism and Jewish culture. For starters, see Emmanuel Rice, Freud and
Moses: The Long Journey Home. (Albany: State University of New York,
1990); Peter Kramer, Freud: Inventor of the Modern Mind. (New York:
Harper Perennial, 2006); Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for our Times (New
York: W.W. Norton, 1988).
10. Cynthia Ozick, The Heretic: The Mythic Passions of Gershom Scholem. (The
New Yorker August 25, 2002).
11. Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism. (Jerusalem: Schocken
Publishing House, 1941).
12. Gershom Scholem, On Kabbalah and its Symbolism (Jerusalem: Schocken
Books, 1965).
CHAPTER 5
Gazing Upon “The Daemons of Unplumbed

Space” with H. P. Lovecraft and Stephen
King: Theorizing Horror and Cosmic Terror
Alissa Burger
In his classic essay Supernatural Horror in Literature (SHL), H. P. Lovecraft

discusses the distinctions between different types of horror and their
impact on the reader, from internal psychological horror to the cosmic ter-
ror that comes from outside the self and, in Lovecraft’s work, often outside
the known universe. Lovecraft’s framework has proven indispensable in
the critical consideration of horror in literature and popular culture,
“widely acknowledged as the finest historical treatment in the field,”1 and
has been frequently added to and negotiated by horror authors and critics
alike in the decades since its first publication. One key negotiation of
Lovecraft’s paradigm can be found in Stephen King’s 1981 critical consid-
eration of the horror genre, Danse Macabre. Echoing Lovecraft’s defini-
tion, King discusses the differences between horror and terror, before
adding a third element to the mix, supplementing these two types of fear
with what he refers to as the “gross-out,”2 a significantly less subtle or
nuanced source of fear, though it is often inextricably intertwined with the
other two types. Beginning with the definitions established by Lovecraft
A. Burger (*)
English, Culver-Stockton College, Canton, MO, USA

78 A. BURGER
and built upon by King, this chapter also explores Lovecraft’s influence on
King with Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu” and “Nyarlathotep” and the
echoes of Lovecraft in King’s novella “The Mist,”3 as well as the outward
spreading ripples of the larger horror genre, including Frank Darabont’s
adaptation of King’s Lovecraftian homage in the 2007 film version of The
Mist, and the types of horror and terror mobilized within each.
Lovecraft’s SHL and King’s Danse Macabre

SHL taps into an ancient and unchanging reality in the observation that
“the oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and
strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown” (25). It is in response to
these unknown depths that Lovecraft theorized his understanding—and
stories—of cosmic fear, a terror that transcended the internal horrors of
madness and the external horror of the “mundanely gruesome” (27). As
Lovecraft defined cosmic fear,
A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer,

unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint, expressed with a
seriousness and portentousness becoming its subject, of that most terrible
conception of the human brain—a malign and particular suspension or
defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the
assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space. (28)
While there is doubtless plenty of fear to be found in the mind of the mad-
man—Lovecraft identifies Poe as the grandmaster of this type of horror—
and everyday life teems with its own unsettling realities, from Lovecraft’s
perspective, true terror comes from beyond the individual, from the dark
depths that lie beyond the scope of human understanding, hinting at
something greater and more powerful than can even be imagined. In con-
sidering whether or not a tale of this type of cosmic horror is successful,
Lovecraft writes that “the one test of the really weird is simply this—
whether or not there be excited in the reader a profound sense of dread,
and of contact with unknown spheres and powers; a subtle attitude of
awed listening, as if for the beating of black wings or the scratching of
outside shapes and entities on the known universe’s utmost rim” (28). It
is there, in those dark spaces between and beyond the stars, outside the
bounds of human understanding, that fear of the unknown is most per-
fectly crystallized and most effectively realized.
GAZING UPON “THE DAEMONS OF UNPLUMBED SPACE”… 79
This type of horror is characteristic of much of Lovecraft’s fiction, most

notably in his stories of the “Great Old Ones,” including the story “The
Call of Cthulhu” and the prose poem “Nyarlathotep,” among others. As
S. T. Joshi explains in his introduction to The Annotated Supernatural
Horror in Literature, this is often called “‘cosmicism’—the central prin-
ciple in [Lovecraft’s] fiction, involving the suggestion of the vast gulfs of
space and time and the consequent triviality of the human race.”4 In fact,
this very transcendence of the personal (and interpersonal) is arguably a
significant factor in drawing readers to Lovecraft even now, tapping into
very contemporary concerns. As David Simmons argues in “H.P. Lovecraft:
Outsider No More?” “The best of Lovecraft’s tales present the reader with
a brand of cosmic horror reliant on a kind of existentialist terror (which
Lovecraft referred to as ‘indifferentism’) that is arguably much more rel-
evant to a twentieth-century reader than the standard Gothic tropes of
haunted houses, maidens in distress, vampires, and werewolves.”5 While
personal, local, national, and global conflicts are in constant flux, the idea
that there are unfathomably powerful beings in the universe who could
not care less about the human race continues to chill, regardless of time,
place, and specific context.
First published in 1927, SHL saw Lovecraft delve into the history of the
genre, including chapters on “The Dawn of the Horror-Tale” and the
development of the Gothic novel, as well as considering contemporary
writers of the “weird.” In many ways, King’s Danse Macabre arguably
picked up where Lovecraft left off, with King beginning from similar his-
torical foundations before turning his attention to the development of the
horror genre in literature and popular culture in the mid- to late-twentieth
century, ranging from canonical horror classics to the monsters of Universal
Studios, drive-in movies, and E.C. Comics. Much like Lovecraft, King lays
out his definitions of different types of horror early on, beginning with his
distinction that effective works of horror “always do their work on two
levels.”6 The first of these is the visceral, gruesome splatter of the “gross-
out,”7 the blood and guts, the textual or visual abjection of fear. However,
as King argues, the “gross-out” is not enough for effective horror, in and
of itself. As he continues, “on another, more potent level, the work of hor-
ror really is a dance—a moving, rhythmic search. And what it’s looking for
is the place where you, the viewer or the reader, live at your most primitive
level.”8 The “gross-out” might shock or disgust the reader or viewer, but
it is this second, more nuanced type of horror that is necessary to truly
disturb.
80 A. BURGER
Finally, much as Lovecraft’s conception of horror included a clear

delineation between the internal and external, or in Lovecraft’s words,
“the terror that stalks about and within us, and the worm that writhes and
slavers in the hideously close abyss,”9 King outlines his own distinctions
between different appeals, arguing that “the genre exists on three more or
less separate levels, each one a little less fine than the one before it”: terror,
horror, and revulsion.10 In King’s hierarchy, terror is the most sophisti-
cated of these and its effectiveness stems from what is imagined rather
than what is seen, the horrific possibilities lurking just beyond the shad-
ow’s edge. Two examples of these unseen horrors King addresses are the
campfire tale of The Hook11 and W. W. Jacobs’s “The Monkey’s Paw.” In
the first story, a wealth of gruesome possibilities and near misses are left to
the imagination, consolidating around the hook dangling from his date’s
door handle when her annoyed suitor reaches to help her out of the car,
while in “The Monkey’s Paw,” the couple’s young son is unspeakably
mangled by machinery in a factory accident and rises from the dead to
return home and knock on his parents’ door, though the reader must fill
in these blanks as the corpse is wished away and his mother opens the door
onto an empty street. As King explains, “We actually see nothing outright
nasty in either story …. It’s what the mind sees that makes these stories
quintessential tales of terror.”12 Effective terror banks on possibility, on
the unseen and unrealized, trading in the creepy and disturbing to get
under the skin and into the psyche of its reader or viewer. Next is horror,
“that emotion of fear that underlies terror, an emotion which is slightly
less fine, because it is not entirely of the mind. Horror also invites a physi-
cal reaction by showing us something which is physically wrong.”13 The
vampire at the window, the face of the corpse, the monster emerging from
the shadows: each of these figures reveals itself, physical and concrete, seen
rather than unseen, and works to elicit horror in the reader or viewer.
Last—and least—is revulsion: the visceral, the disgusting, the blood and
guts that are often mistakenly perceived as the stock and trade of the hor-
ror genre, the gag-inducing “gross-out.”14
These distinctions are reflected in the writing of both Lovecraft and
King, including Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu” and “Nyarlathotep,”
and King’s “The Mist,” which bears the unmistakable stamp of Lovecraftian
inspiration. In addition, as Lovecraft and King both noted, the genre of
horror continues to change, building upon its core elements to shift and
evolve to effectively reflect and address each unique cultural moment. As
part of that evolution, horror has expanded significantly beyond the
ritten text, breaking loose of the literary page of Lovecraft’s critical anal-
w
ysis to expand its reach, a multimodal popular culture reality reflected in
Frank Darabont’s 2007 film adaptation of The Mist.
“The Call of Cthulhu” and “Nyarlathotep”

At the center of Lovecraft’s cosmic terrors are his Great Old Ones from
beyond the realm of human knowledge or understanding, who may hold
the fate of humanity within their monstrous gaze and care nothing for the
individuals therein. Many of Lovecraft’s most iconic stories tell of these
gods, including “Dagon,” “Nyarlathotep,” “The Colour Out of Space,”
“The Dunwich Horror,” “At the Mountains of Madness,” and “The
Shadow over Innsmouth.”15 Among the most powerful of these gods is
Cthulhu and “The Call of Cthulhu” forms a cornerstone of the Cthulhu
Mythos, a term coined by August Derleth and a tradition which has rip-
pled well beyond Lovecraft’s own creations in the twentieth and twenty-
first centuries, echoed in the work of King and countless other writers of
horror and science fiction. One of Lovecraft’s most iconic works, “The
Call of Cthulhu” chronicles the narrator’s growing knowledge of a horror
which, once comprehended, he longs to escape, as he chases down his
uncle’s cryptic notes, the sketches of an unsettling statue, rumors of dark
rituals in the swamp, and the horrific experiences of one very unlucky
group of sailors.
While “The Call of Cthulhu” hints at nightmares of what could be, at
destruction narrowly and temporarily averted, “Nyarlathotep” describes a
world after the worst has already come to pass. As T. R. Livesey points out,
there is a “cycle of struggles—or more specifically, invasions—as a unifying
theme that links many of Lovecraft’s tales together”16 and “Nyarlathotep”
follows this invasion pattern through to its humanity-shattering conclu-
sion. The narrator offers his account from a destroyed and post-apocalyptic
world, establishing his solitary survival in the opening lines: “Nyarlathotep
… the crawling chaos … I am the last … I will tell the audient void.”17 As
the narrator tells his audience, the end of the world was ushered in with
the coming of the eponymous showman, who “came out of Egypt and
looked like a Pharaoh.”18 While Nyarlathotep is not as outwardly and
unmistakably monstrous as Cthulhu, he is a “sinister, hypnotic for-
eigner,”19 and the knowledge he shares with those who come to him bring
cosmic horror and destruction. Audiences flock to Nyarlathotep and the
narrator confesses that among them, “I burned with eagerness to explore
82 A. BURGER
his uttermost mysteries.”20 Like many of Lovecraft’s cosmic terrors, exactly

what the narrator and the gathered masses see remains only broadly
sketched, as Nyarlathotep projects images of death and destruction: “I saw
the world battling against blackness; against the waves of destruction from
ultimate space; whirling, churning; struggling around the dimming, cool-
ing sun.”21 The narrator holds on to defiant denial as long as he can—“I
screamed aloud that I was not afraid”22—but in time he, like all the others
around him, is herded off into a post-apocalyptic wasteland, as the group
is separated, sent in three different directions. The world is no longer the
provenance of humanity and as the narrator walks, he sees the artifacts of
this now bygone age, with grass growing up through the sidewalks and an
overturned tramcar.23 The Great Old Ones have been waiting to fill the
void, however, and while the world is all but dead, it is far from silent and
there is “through this revolting graveyard of the universe the muffled,
maddening beating of drums, and thin, monotonous whine of blasphe-
mous flutes from inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond Time,” the
music of monsters, “the gigantic, tenebrous, ultimate gods—the blind,
voiceless, mindless gargoyles whose soul is Nyarlathotep.”24 In “The Call
of Cthulhu,” destruction is momentarily avoided, but in “Nyarlathotep,”
that unavoidable and inescapable moment has come, leaving one man to
scream his understanding to a cold, now-empty, and unfeeling world that
he is powerless to change or reclaim.
Both of these works offer excellent examples of the cosmic terror
Lovecraft outlined in SHL, including a vast and monstrously incompre-
hensible threat and the relatively inconsequential nature of humanity, in
the face of the aforementioned “unknown spheres and powers.”25 As Mark
Lowell argues, in the powerlessness of the human before these creatures,
Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos is the diametric opposite of the traditional
hero’s journey, “a perversion of what Joseph Campbell called the mythic
cycle, or the monomyth.”26 As Lowell explains, “In the monomyth, a her-
ald calls a hero into a realm of myth and the unconscious where he con-
fronts various tribulations and emerges with a boon for his fellow men.
However, for Lovecraft … this realm of myth contains only sorrow, insan-
ity, and death; by entering it one realizes the truth of humanity’s insignifi-
cance in the universe.”27 Instead of setting out into the world and
conquering the adversary which lies there, the Lovecraftian hero finds that
there are questions best left unasked, horrifying truths better left unknown.
As Donald R. Burleson explains in Lovecraft—Disturbing the Universe, a
key theme of Lovecraft’s fiction is that of “‘forbidden knowledge’ or
‘merciful ignorance’—the theme that there are species of knowledge only

by ignorance of which humankind can maintain even the semblance of
well-being.”28 Rather than being enriched by his or her trials and experi-
ences, the Lovecraftian hero is destroyed by them, burdened with a knowl-
edge that taints the world around him or her rather than clarifying or
strengthening it, and the reward is usually madness or death, rather than
the self-actualization and social reincorporation of the heroic Campbell
tradition. Within this new knowledge, there is no hope, no possibility of
salvation but, instead, only an exhausting struggle which inevitably ends
in—an often hoped-for—death. In his final pages, the doomed narrator of
“The Call of Cthulhu” reflects on how his perspective has been irreversibly
tainted: “I shall never sleep calmly again when I think of the horrors that
lurk ceaselessly behind life in time and space.”29 What is seen cannot be
unseen, what is learned cannot be forgotten, and the Lovecraftian hero is
cursed to carry this knowledge to the grave, broken by the futile nature of
the human struggle for life and meaning in the face of cosmic terror.
Faced with this new and horrifying reality, many of Lovecraft’s heroes
echo this narrator’s desperate yearning for their earlier ignorance. As Pete
Rawlik explains in his essay “Defining Lovecraftian Horror,” “The major-
ity of humanity does not recognize its own insignificance, the indifference
of the universe, or its true nature,”30 which is often a blessing. Throughout
“The Call of Cthulhu,” the narrator repeatedly reflects on his earlier inno-
cence, the “ingrained skepticism”31 and “callous rationalism”32 with which
he first approached his grand-uncle’s manuscript; he especially mourns the
moment when he could—and should—have turned back but instead
plunged blindly onward, in spite of his question “Was I tottering on the
brink of cosmic horrors beyond man’s power to bear?”33 By the time he
discovers the answer to this question, it is too late to turn back. However,
in another of the characteristic elements of Lovecraftian cosmic terror, the
hero is powerless to do anything with this newfound understanding, as
“regardless of the knowledge or abilities gained, the protagonist has little
hope of affecting the course of events, or of revealing all that has been
hidden.”34 The narrator leaves behind a manuscript that will pass the ter-
ror on to the next reader, though with his final words, he hopes for its
destruction: “Let me pray that, if I do not survive this manuscript, my
executors may put caution before audacity and see that it meets no other
eye.”35 While in “The Call of Cthulhu” the narrator maintains his silence,
in “Nyarlathotep,” the hero rails against this new world order, as do many
of his fellow survivors; when he screams his negation, he is not alone “and
84 A. BURGER
others screamed with me for solace.”36 Later, as the world breaks down
around them, “We sware to one another that the city was exactly the same,
and still alive.”37 In the end, despite their screams and protestations, their
vehement denial, they are marched off into the now desolate wastelands,
into the unknown and “the sightless vortex of the unimaginable,”38 their
fight ultimately futile.
Lovecraft’s tales of monstrosity largely steer clear of what King refers to
as the “gross-out” and what SHL dismisses as “mere physical fear and the
mundanely gruesome” (27), though there are brief and abstract forays
into this realm, such as the discovery of the human sacrifices in the
Louisiana swamp in “The Call of Cthulhu,” where Inspector Legrasse and
his men find “the oddly marred bodies of the helpless squatters who had
disappeared.”39 While the fears Lovecraft evokes are external and cosmi-
cally defined, distinctions can be drawn between the horror and terror
King differentiates in Danse Macabre. As King describes horror, this is the
demarcation of the “physically wrong,”40 perhaps best realized in the
unanimous responses of viewers to the Cthulhu statuettes, which the nar-
rator of “The Call of Cthulhu” describes as “a form which only a diseased
imagination could conceive,”41 “grotesque, repulsive,”42 and overwhelm-
ingly unsettling. This wrongness is echoed in Wilcox’s dreams and
Johansen’s notes on the island where he and his fellow sailors inadver-
tently freed Cthulhu himself, with this otherness hinted at by “the geom-
etry of the dream-place … [which] was abnormal, non-Euclidian, and
loathsomely redolent of spheres and dimensions apart from ours.”43 The
horror of this visible not-rightness is merely a concrete manifestation of
the true and unfathomable cosmic terror that lies beyond, however, and it
is this terror which King refers to as the most sophisticated of these
appeals,44 the horrifying reality of the unseen and unremitting threat can
never be defeated or even truly known. Cthulhu has gone back to sleep,
but will not sleep forever. Even in the post-apocalyptic aftermath of
“Nyarlathotep,” much of the monstrous remains unseen, glimpsed only in
its devastating impact on humanity, as recorded by the nameless narrator.
In both “The Call of Cthulhu” and “Nyarlathotep,” the greatest part of
Lovecraft’s horror is found where it always is in his Cthulhu Mythos tales:
in the realization of humanity’s insignificance, its powerlessness in the face
of a potent and destructive cosmic terror which defies comprehension, let
alone control.
The “beating of black wings”45 which SHL describes is made literal in
“The Call of Cthulhu” and “Nyarlathotep,” the possibility of these
onsters lurking just beyond the bounds of human consciousness burst-

m
ing through these boundaries, seen and known. While the threat is tempo-
rarily laid back to rest in “The Call of Cthulhu,” there is no such tenuously
hopeful resolution in “Nyarlathotep,” where the Great Old Ones have
come to stay, to conquer, and to destroy. Even the precarious peace at the
end of “The Call of Cthulhu” is but a momentary caesura. The cosmic
terror can never be conquered or defeated and the return of Cthulhu to
his dreaming prison is only a temporary reprieve, a truth that haunts
Lovecraft’s doomed narrator and reader alike.
“The Mist”
While there is plenty of horror to be drawn from the internal and the
everyday—the abuser, the madman, the serial killer, to name just a few—
external horror is often more unsettling and more effectively disturbing, a
truth Lovecraft explored at length with his tales of cosmic terror. As King
writes in Danse Macabre,
It is the concept of outside evil that is larger, more awesome. Lovecraft

grasped this, and it is what makes his stories of stupendous, Cyclopean evil
so effective when they are good …. The best of them make us feel the size
of the universe we hang suspended in, and suggest shadowy forces that
could destroy us all if they so much as grunted in their sleep. After all, what
is the paltry inside evil of the A-bomb when compared to Nyarlathotep, the
Crawling Chaos, or Shub-Niggurath, the Goat with a Thousand Young?46
It is this Lovecraftian mythos of cosmic terror and the Great Old Ones
that King taps into with his novella “The Mist.” As Joshi remarks of
Lovecraft’s own literary inspirations in the introduction to The Annotated
Supernatural Horror in Literature, Lovecraft “transmuted what he bor-
rowed and made it uniquely his own.”47 Much the same can be said of
King—and countless other authors who have continued in the vein of
Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos48—in his influence and inspiration by
Lovecraft. In King’s works, there remain several common characteristics
of what Mark Jones calls the “literary Lovecraftian,” which is “character-
ized chiefly by an imperturbable unease and grotesque psychogeographies,
as well as by an acute consciousness of Lovecraft’s cosmic alienation.”49
King reflects on this continuing impact in his essay “Lovecraft’s Pillow,”
writing that Lovecraft “continues to remain not just popular with
86 A. BURGER
eneration after generation of maturing readers but viscerally important to

g
an imaginative core group that goes on to write that generation’s fantasy
and weird tales … and, by so doing, to chart that generation’s deepest
fears.”50 Finally, in the decades following Lovecraft’s completion of SHL,
the horror genre has taken on new dimensions, expanding into and explor-
ing new mediums, which elicit horror and terror in different ways, includ-
ing the visual realm of the horror film, as reflected in the film adaptation
of King’s The Mist.
King’s The Mist effectively combines the various types of horror laid out
both by Lovecraft in SHL and by King himself in Danse Macabre: in this
novella, Lovecraft’s internal, psychological horror combines with external,
cosmic terror, while also working on the three levels of terror, horror, and
the “gross-out” defined by King.51 In King’s novella, a small Maine town
is enveloped in a mysterious mist following a freak storm, trapping narra-
tor David Drayton, his son Billy, and an assortment of other townspeople
in the Federal Foods grocery store, a setting which quickly becomes a
claustrophobic and emotionally charged pressure cooker for its terrified
inhabitants. The mist is unnatural: white and flat, “The edge of the mist
was nearly ruler-straight”52 as it progresses, moving implacably and impos-
sibly against the wind.53 As Drayton and the other trapped people soon
discover, the impenetrable white of the mist hides a pantheon of
Lovecraftian horrors. A tentacled creature pulls the bag boy Norm scream-
ing from the grocery’s back room54 and when night falls, the front win-
dows are covered by giant bug-like creatures,55 which are in turn picked
off by pterodactyl-like monstrosities.56 When Drayton joins a small group
venturing out into the mist to investigate the nearby pharmacy for fellow
survivors, they are attacked by new horrors: giant spider-like creatures
who spin corrosive webs. In “The Call of Cthulhu,” the narrator reflects
that “the Thing cannot be described—there is no language for such
abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy, such eldritch contradictions
of all matter, force, and cosmic order.”57 Drayton and his fellow survivors
find themselves facing the same lack: while they may cast about to frame
these new horrors somewhere in relation to their own experiences—adja-
cent to them, if not quite within them—these attempts fall short of
encompassing the full terror they face. This linguistic and conceptual
shortcoming is most powerfully captured as Drayton and a small band of
survivors attempt to make their escape, which Douglas Winter argues is
“Stephen King’s most literal and most Lovecraftian night journey.”58 As
Drayton marvels,
Something came … that is all I can say for sure …. It was six-legged, I know
that; its skin was slaty gray that mottled to dark brown in places …. I don’t
know how big it actually was, but it passed directly over us. One of its gray,
wrinkled legs smashed down right beside my window, and Mrs. Reppler said
later she could not see the underside of its body, although she craned her
neck up to look. She saw only two Cyclopean legs going up and up into the
mist like living towers until they were lost to sight …. For the moment it was
over the Scout I had an impression of something so big that it might have
made a blue whale look the size of a trout—in other words, something so
big that it defied the imagination. Then it was gone, sending a seismological
series of thuds back.59
Like Lovecraft’s monsters, words cannot contain or even adequately

express what Drayton has seen or the horrors of that which remains
unseen. This sense of the unknown—one of Lovecraft’s defining charac-
teristics of the true weird tale and effective cosmic terror—reverberates
through Drayton’s experience, even as he reflects upon the limits of his
perception. As he says of his fragmentary glimpse of the huge and mon-
strous creature which steps over them, “It may have been the fact that the
mist only allowed us to glimpse things briefly, but I think it just as likely
that there are certain things that your brain simply disallows. There are
things of such darkness and horror—just, I suppose, as there are things of
such great beauty—that they will not fit through the puny human doors
of perception.”60 In this new reality, the world is remade with the coming
of the mist and the monsters within it, and those who have survived must
do so in constant terror of powers that challenge their very ability to see
and understand them, making even the thought of resisting or fighting
against them impossible.
Within the larger scope of this Lovecraftian cosmic terror, there is also
horror on a human level with the coming of the mist. For Lovecraft, in
SHL, true horror comes from the external, beyond the individual and
outside the bounds of human knowledge, and Lovecraft argues that sto-
ries of “abnormal psychology and monomania … express terror but not
weirdess”(57). For King, however, the microcosm of the individual can be
just as horrifying as the cosmic threat, whether in the internal madness of
one character or in the violence people are capable of committing against
once another under pressure. As Winter writes in Stephen King: The Art of
Darkness, “The spawn of the mist might seem endless in horrifying variety;
but the mist, and what is signifies, is more important than its monsters.”61
88 A. BURGER
Trapped within the supermarket, the baser and more violent natures of the
men and women trapped inside emerge, especially in the religious fanati-
cism of Mrs. Carmody, who calls for a blood sacrifice and, as their ordeal
wears on, draws an increasing number of people to her Old Testament
zealotry. As John Langan argues in “Nature’s Other, Ghastly Face:
H.P. Lovecraft and the Animal Sublime in Stephen King,” “King has used
the model of Lovecraft’s fiction as a vehicle for him to express his own
concerns, in particular an anxiety that what lies beneath the veneer of
human civilization, of human identity, is the animal, Tennyson’s ‘Nature,
red in tooth and claw.’ It is a manifestation of post-Darwinian fears over
the blurring of the distinction between the human and the animal.”62
Rather than pulling together, many of the grocery store’s inhabitants turn
against one another. As Douglas explains, “The besieged occupants of the
supermarket are a representative sample of humanity, put to the test of the
external threat of the mist and the internal claustrophobia—and mad-
ness—of the supermarket. They undergo hysteria and fragmentation, and
acts of courage and of stupidity result only in bloodshed.”63 No matter
how the survivors respond to the crisis, it ends badly: staying in the super-
market is not a long-term solution, but those who emerge are destroyed,
whether their venturing into the mist is prompted by machismo (Norm
the bag boy), a steadfast refusal to believe in the danger (Brent Norton
and the Flat-Earth Society), or in the guise of a semi-heroic quest (the
group that sets out for the pharmacy). Faced with this lose-lose situation,
an increasing number of those in the supermarket nihilistically opt out,
through substance abuse, suicide, and insanity. The only survivors who
have even a chance of salvation are those who flee the grocery with
Drayton, and their safety and survival is very far from assured as they head
ever southward into the unrelenting mist.
The human horrors are further underscored in the speculated causes of
the mist itself and the shadowy Arrowhead Project. As Drayton considers
early in the novella, “No one knew for sure where the name Arrowhead
Project came from and no one could tell you for one hundred percent sure
that that really was the name of the project—if there was a project.”64
While a number of theories are floated—from nuclear testing to agricul-
tural experimentation—its true nature remains undefined, though the sui-
cide of two Arrowhead Project soldiers trapped in the supermarket carries
unsettling implications. As Ollie Weeks speculates, “Maybe [the storm]
knocked something loose up there. Maybe there was an accident. They
could have been fooling around with anything …. And suppose … suppose
they ripped a hole straight through into another dimension?”65 This

potential transgression between dimensions, the destructive rupturing of
cosmic boundaries, is evocative of Lovecraft, achieved here through tech-
nological experimentation and irresponsibility rather than the devotions of
cultists, though the results are much the same. In “The Mist,” just as the
monsters themselves remain beyond reason and understanding, so does
this potential explanation; as Winter argues, “The culprits of the Arrowhead
Project remain as faceless and opaque as the mist itself. And this only
increases our unease; there is no patent lunatic or misguided zealot on
which to foist our responsibility.”66 At the end of King’s novella, the
humans are left with only the unknown of cosmic terror: the monsters
defy comprehension, their causes remain outside the scope of human
understanding, and Drayton and his fellow survivors face an uncertain
future and the possibility that the mist may prove inescapable. Like
Lovecraft’s narrator in “The Call of Cthulhu,” Drayton leaves behind a
manuscript, though in this case he hopes for it to be found, which would
mean there are other survivors.
The close of King’s novella is unresolved and, as Winter writes,
“Drayton’s narrative has no ending in the traditional sense.”67 Drayton
leaves his manuscript behind for others to find and leaves readers to specu-
late about what became of him, his son, and their small band of survivors.
However, the conclusion of King’s novella is arguably cautiously optimis-
tic as, scanning a multiband radio, Drayton hears what may be a commu-
nication from beyond the mist. In his final sentences, Drayton offers his
son, and by extension the reader, “Two words that sound a bit alike ….
One of them is Hartford …. The other is hope.”68 It is this fragile, tenta-
tively optimistic conclusion that leads Winter to argue that in “The Mist,”
King “does not embrace entirely the ‘cosmic pessimism’ of
H.P. Lovecraft.”69 While King is best known for his tales of supernatural
and real life horrors, his work has a deep streak of sentimentality and faith
in the best possibilities of human nature, such as the triumph of good over
evil, no matter how overwhelmingly the odds are stacked against them, or
the belief that love can conquer all, encouraging his characters to be their
own best selves and even transcending the bounds of life and death, as
with the ghostly intercessions in King’s most traditionally Gothic novel to
date, Bag of Bones (1998). As Sarah Langan explains in “Killing Our
Monsters: On Stephen King’s Magic,” many of King’s novels ask us to
consider big questions that look right into the heart of humanity, such as
“Will we be the heroes of our own societies, and start steering this ship in
90 A. BURGER
the right direction? Do we have the courage to save the world?”70 In

King’s world, the answers to these questions are almost always “yes.” The
fight is assuredly hard and at times even impossible to win, but King’s faith
in the human spirit is just as much a hallmark of his writing as the horrors
that wait in the darkness. This sentimentality is not always well received by
critics and fans and as Langan continues her analysis, “We live in cynical
times. It’s cool to pretend these questions are stupid, irrelevant—dishon-
est reductions of issues much more complex … In other words, King’s
treatment of this subject is schlock. But really, aren’t these questions worth
asking? Aren’t they the only questions worth asking?”71 King’s optimism
and fundamental belief in the goodness of humanity is in dramatic opposi-
tion to Lovecraft’s cosmic indifferentism; while Lovecraft’s mythos argues
that the human race is inconsequential in the face of unassailable cosmic
horrors, King argues that hope and love in spite of those horrors are the
only things that really matter.
In the 90 years since Lovecraft published SHL, horror has also leapt off
of the literary page and as Jones explains, “the difference between
Lovecraft’s own period and more recent years is in the range of media
involved,”72 from television and film to video games, graphic novels, and
board games. Cinematic horror has its own distinctive characteristics,
building upon the literary foundation of authors such as Lovecraft and
King to elicit horror and terror in another medium. Where the author cre-
ates a story textually, leaving it largely to the reader’s imagination to envi-
sion, film is a distinctly visual medium, one which shows rather than tells.
While reading can be understood as an active, engaged process—the
reader takes in the words, makes meaning of them, creates a correspond-
ing image in his or her mind to visualize the narrative—film viewing is, in
contrast, arguably more passive. In many ways, through taking on this
receptive position, Bruce Kawin argues, “One goes to a horror film in
order to have a nightmare.”73 In addition to considering these different
avenues of viewer engagement, as Linda Costanzo Cahir writes in
Literature into Film: Theory and Practical Approaches, any effective com-
parative analysis must be appreciative of “the medium-specificity of both
literature and film (their ontology).”74 Rather than thinking in terms of
comparative text-to-screen adaptation, Cahir develops an analytical frame-
work that views these films instead as “translations,” ranging from literal
to traditional and radical.75 This act is inherently interpretive and as Cahir
argues, “Through the process of translation a fully new text—a materially
different entity—is made, one that simultaneously has a strong relationship
with its original source, yet is fully independent from it.”76 As a result of
these unique mediums, while both King’s novella and Darabont’s film ver-
sion of The Mist are able to achieve terror, they do so in dynamically dif-
ferent ways, with the textual predominant in King’s work, giving way to
the visually reimagined in Darabont’s film.
In 2007, Frank Darabont77 directed a film adaptation of King’s The
Mist, starring Thomas Jane, Laurie Holden, Marcia Gay Harden, and
Andre Braugher. Many of King’s novels and stories have been adapted for
film and television, some much better than others, and The Mist is argu-
ably among the most effective of these adaptations. Despite Darabont’s
substantial changes to King’s story, it ranks among King’s favorite adapta-
tions of his own work78 and is also popular among viewers, including many
who are unaware of its literary origin.79 Like King’s novella, Darabont’s
film appeals to the full range of horror established by Lovecraft and King,
from internal, psychological horror to external, cosmic terror, and every-
thing in between.80 The H. R. Giger-esque monsters are brought to life
via special effects, positioning the viewer alongside Drayton and his fellow
survivors as they catch their first glimpse of these horrors. The cinematic
jump-scare parallels King’s notion of the “gross-out,” with the easy fright
of a giant spider-creature emerging suddenly from the mist paling in com-
parison to the larger, more unsettling horror and terror established by the
human conflict within the supermarket and the cosmic terrors that remain
unseen.81 As Claudia Puig writes in her review of the film, “it’s an old-
school horror movie complete with huge insect predators and plenty of
gore, but the questions it raises about religion, paranoia, mob behavior,
and human nature are the most intriguing aspects of the movie,”82 with
Harden’s performance as the fanatical Mrs. Carmody—expanded signifi-
cantly from the novella—and the ease with which she spurs her followers
to human sacrifice especially chilling. As Patrick McAleer argues in
“Plucking Stems, Pulling Strings, and Pushing Agendas: The Consistency
of Personal Failure and Mental Frailty in The Mist,” “the film’s horror
stems from the follies and dubious actions of the film’s citizenry, and that
their unscrupulous deeds are more than just troubling—they are based in
reality.”83 In other words, the characters’ reactions to the threat are not
inexplicably monstrous, but all too humanly cruel. It is on this level of
human horror, rather than the monsters and special effects with which
they are rendered, that made The Mist as relevant in 2007 as it was when
King first published his novella in 1980. As reviewer Anthony Breznican
argues of the film, there are “accidental parallels to contemporary life. Its
92 A. BURGER
tale of strangers trapped in a crisis situation that brings out their best and
worst traits could be read as an allegory for everything from the morning
of 9/11 to Hurricane Katrina or the California wildfire evacuations.”84
Like Lovecraft’s unchanging cosmic indifferentism, the horror implicit in
humanity itself remains a constant touchstone, never losing its power to
terrify.
No consideration of Darabont’s The Mist is complete without discus-
sion of its dramatically different ending. To draw on Cahir’s terminology,
the excruciating final minutes of Darabont’s film are a radical departure in
an otherwise largely traditional text-to-film translation. While King’s
novella ends on a cautiously optimistic note, in his film adaptation,
Darabont does not veer away from the cosmic terror of the Lovecraftian
tradition and the film as a whole. Rather than King’s hopeful conclusion,
the end of Darabont’s film offers only further horror: trapped in their car
and in the mist, Drayton uses the gun and its four remaining bullets to kill
his companions, including his own son, in order to spare them from being
devoured by the monsters. But when he emerges into the mist, having
sacrificed everything and become a monster himself, what emerges from
the mist is not a creature of cosmic terror but military rescue, a twist which
pulls Drayton back from the brink of cosmic terror only to plunge him
irredeemably into the grip of his own internal and inescapable horror. As
McAleer writes, Drayton’s “level of pain is Shakespearean, and as the audi-
ence witnesses the army finally fortifying a presence in the town and
destroying the creatures that have dominated the people and the land for
only a few days, the father must live with more than the memory of night-
marish monstrosity; he must live with its reality for the rest of his life.”85
Darabont refuses to relieve this tension, lingering on Drayton’s anguish,
and when the credits begin to roll, they do so against the diegetic sound
of rolling tanks and trucks, rather than being mitigated by seguing to a
musical soundtrack, instead keeping the viewer arrested by Drayton’s suf-
fering and the horror of the help that was “a mere 115 seconds too late.”86
As King writes in “What’s Scary,” his forenote to the 2010 edition of
Danse Macabre, “The ending [of Darabont’s The Mist] will tear your heart
out … but so will life, in the end. Frank Darabont’s vision of hell is com-
pletely uncompromising.”87 In terms of external cosmic horror, the final
moments of Darabont’s film turn away from the Lovecraftian: the mon-
sters are soundly defeated and their dead bodies are being incinerated by
flamethrowers, with humanity victorious, a conclusion all but unthinkable
within the world of Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos and the deathless horrors
which populate it. However, when it comes to bleak darkness and hope-
lessness, the tenor of Darabont’s film is far more evocative of the
Lovecraftian influence than King’s novella, with its hint of optimism and
potential salvation.
The impact of Lovecraft, in both his mythos and his criticism, resonates
throughout King’s novella and its film adaptation, underscoring the myr-
iad ways in which Lovecraft helped establish the foundation for and con-
tinues to influence the traditions of weird fiction and cosmic horror. From
the critical consideration of different types of horror in Lovecraft’s SHL
and King’s Danse Macabre to the monstrous creatures in the mist that
could have been drawn directly from Lovecraft’s “unplumbed space,”88
the ideology and impact of Lovecraft runs through and connects these
texts, in horrors both psychological and cosmic, in works both critical and
creative.
Notes
1. S.T. Joshi, “Introduction” in The Annotated Supernatural Horror in
Literature (New York: Hippocampus, 2012), 7.
2. Stephen King, Danse Macabre (New York: Gallery, 2010 [1981]), 3.
3. Lovecraft’s influence is evident in many of King’s other works as well,
including the short stories “Jerusalem’s Lot” and “Graveyard Shift” (in
Night Shift, 1978), “Gramma” (in Skeleton Crew, which also includes “The
Mist”), “Crouch End” (in the 1993 collection Nightmares and
Dreamscapes), and the e-book novella “Mile 81” (2001). King’s story “N.”
(in the 2008 collection Just After Sunset) also draws upon markedly
Lovecraftian cosmic terrors, which are further explored in Marc
Guggenheim and Alex Maleev’s graphic novel and online adapted series of
“mobisodes,” which are “short one to one-and-a-half minute segments
that could be downloaded easily on … a mobile phone” or other portable
device (Guggenheim iv).
4. Joshi, “Introduction” 14.
5. David Simmons, “H.P. Lovecraft: Outsider No More?” in New Critical
Essays on H.P. Lovecraft. Ed. David Simmons. (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan), 2.
6. King, Danse Macabre 3.
7. Ibid.
9. Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror in Literature 56.
94 A. BURGER
11. Chapter 2 of Danse Macabre is titled “Tales of the Hook” and King opens
the chapter with this familiar story, which he refers to as “the most basic
horror story I know” (19): boy and girl heading to Lover’s Lane hear
about an escaped madman with a hook for a hand and a penchant for
slaughtering licentious teenagers, but carry on anyway until the girl
becomes anxious and demands to be taken home, where the boy finds a
hook dangling from the car door handle (Danse Macabre 19–21).
13. Ibid.
15. An excellent and comprehensive collection of these stories is The Complete
Cthulhu Mythos Tales (New York: Fall River Press, 2013), which includes
an introduction by preeminent Lovecraft scholar S. T. Joshi.
16. T.R. Livesey, “Green Storm Rising: Lovecraft’s Roots in Invasion
Literature” in Lovecraft and Influence: His Predecessors and Successors
(Studies in Supernatural Literature). Ed. Robert H. Waugh (Lanham,
MD: Scarecrow Press, 2013), 83.
17. H.P. Lovecraft, “Nyarlathotep” in The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird
Stories. Ed. S.T. Joshi. (New York: Penguin Classics, 1999): 31.
18. Lovecraft, “Nyarlathotep” 31. As Joshi explains in his notes on
“Nyarlathotep,” this figure is described with a variety of different appear-
ances: “he appears in such widely divergent forms that it may not be pos-
sible to establish a single or coherent symbolism for him; to say merely, as
some critics have done, that he is a ‘shapeshifter’ (something Lovecraft
never genuinely suggests) is only to admit that even his physical form is not
consistent from story to story, much less his thematic significance” (369).
19. Gavin Callaghan, “A Reprehensible Habit: H.P. Lovecraft and the Munsey
Magazines” in Lovecraft and Influence: His Predecessors and Successors
(Studies in Supernatural Literature). Ed. Robert H. Waugh (Lanham,
MD: Scarecrow Press, 2013): 70.
20. Lovecraft, “Nyarlathotep” 32.
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid, emphasis original.
24. Ibid.
25. Lovecraft, The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature 28.
26. Mark Lowell, “Lovecraft’s CTHULHU MYTHOS,” Explicator 63.1
(2004), 48.
27. Ibid.
28. Donald R. Burleson, Lovecraft—Disturbing the Universe (Lexington:
University of Kentucky Press, 1990), 156.
29. Lovecraft, “The Call of Cthulhu” 164.
30. Pete Rawlik, “Defining Lovecraftian Horror,” The Lovecraft eZine. Web.
34. Rawlik.
37. Ibid, emphasis original.
43. Lovecraft, “The Call of Cthulhu” 166. The “dream-place” referred to is
Wilcox’s, though Johansen’s experience of the actual island echoes it
almost exactly; connecting these two men’s perceptions, the narrator
remembers Wilcox’s dream and says, “Now an unlettered seaman felt the
same thing wilst gazing at the terrible reality” (“The Call of Cthulhu”
166). While the reality itself is beyond human understanding and exis-
tence, in their experience of this horror, these two very different men are
united.
45. Lovecraft, The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature 28.
47. Joshi, “Introduction” 24.
48. King briefly considers this impact in his essay “Lovecraft’s Pillow,” writing
that “such a list of writers would include Clark Ashton Smith, William
Hope Hodgson, Fritz Leiber, Harlan Ellison, Jonathan Kellerman, Peter
Straub, Charles Willeford, Poppy Z. Brite, James Crumley, John
D. MacDonald, Michael Chabon, Ramsey Campbell, Kingsley Amis, Neil
Gaiman, Flannery O’Connor, and Tennessee Williams. This is just where
the list starts, mind you” (17, emphasis original).
49. Mark Jones, “Tentacles and Teeth: The Lovecraftian Being in Popular
Culture” in New Critical Essays on H.P. Lovecraft. Ed. David Simmons
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 228.
50. Stephen King, “Lovecraft’s Pillow” in Michel Houellebecq’s H.P. Lovecraft:
Against the World, Against Life. Trans. Dorna Khazeni (San Francisco:
Believer Books, 2005), 14, emphasis original.
51. In addition to these Lovecraftian influences, Douglas Winter situates “The
Mist” within the larger context of the horror genre in Stephen King: The
Art of Darkness, drawing connections to the larger subgenre of technohor-
96 A. BURGER
ror, the 1950s B-movie tradition, and the films of George Romero, includ-
ing Night of the Living Dead (1968) and Dawn of the Dead (1979).
52. Stephen King, “The Mist” in Skeleton Crew (New York: Signet, 1986
[1985]), 37.
53. King, “The Mist” 38.
54. King, “The Mist” 70–74.
55. King, “The Mist” 105–106.
56. King, “The Mist” 107–108.
58. Douglas Winter, Stephen King: The Art of Darkness (New York: New
American Library, 1984), 92.
60. Ibid.
61. Winter 89.
62. John Langan, “Nature’s Other, Ghastly Face: H.P. Lovecraft and the
Animal Sublime in Stephen King” in Lovecraft and Influence: His
Predecessors and Successors (Studies in Supernatural Literature). Ed. Robert
H. Waugh (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2013), 158.
63. Winter 89.
66. Winter 89.
67. Winter 92.
69. Winter 93.
70. Sarah Langan, “Killing Our Monsters: On Stephen King’s Magic” in Los
Angeles Review of Books (2012), emphasis original. Langan’s article was
part of a debate on King’s literary merit, which was started with Dwight
Allen’s article “My Stephen King Problem: A Snob’s Notes,” also in the
Los Angeles Review of Books, to which Langan responded.
71. Langan, emphasis original.
72. Jones 228.
73. Bruce Kawin, “The Mummy’s Pool” in Planks of Reason: Essays on the
Horror Film, Revised ed. Ed. Barry Keith Grant and Christopher Sharrett
(Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2004): 4.
74. Linda Constanzo Cahir, Literature into Film: Theory and Practical
Approaches (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006), 8.
75. Cahir 16–17.
76. Cahir 14.
77. Darabont has directed other King adaptations as well, including The
Shawshank Redemption (1994) and The Green Mile (1999).
78. Anthony Breznican, “Today’s Fears Emerge in ‘The Mist’” in USA Today
(2007); Stephen King, “My 10 Favorite Adaptations” in Stephen King Goes
to the Movies (New York: Pocket Books, 2009), 627.
79. At the time of this writing, The Mist has a user rating of 7.2 out of 10 on
the Internet Movie Database (IMDb.com) website.
80. In addition to the clear Lovecraftian influence, the film also gives a self-
referential nod to King’s larger canon, as the opening scene depicts David
Drayton working on a painting of Roland Deschain, the protagonist of
King’s epic Dark Tower series. The notion of other worlds is central to the
Dark Tower series, as well; as Patrick McAleer explains, “King takes great
care in his Dark Tower series to posit the notion that there are multiple
worlds surrounding our world, and that a simple doorway can lead into
dark and dangerous unknown worlds, or allow beings to walk into our own
world, just like in The Mist” (206).
81. The film leaves much less unknown than King’s novella, which is arguably
less effective at creating true horror and cosmic terror than leaving some of
those greater mysteries unrevealed and the monsters unseen. Private Jessup
(played by Sam Witwer), one of the soldiers from the Arrowhead Project
who also finds himself trapped within the supermarket, explains the source
of the mist, confessing that “they thought that there were other dimen-
sions … other worlds all around us … they wanted to make a window …
so they could look through and see what’s on the other side …. They must
have ripped a hole open by accident and this whole other world came spill-
ing through to ours.” Drayton’s wife, Stephanie, is found killed by the
spider creatures, while in the novella her fate remains unknown. Finally,
Darabont’s film even provides a good look at the giant creature that passes
over Drayton’s car, which is only glimpsed fragmentarily and remains
largely unseen in King’s novella.
82. Claudia Puig, “Cynicism lurks in ‘The Mist’” in USA Today (2007).
83. Patrick McAleer, “Plucking Stems, Pulling Strings, and Pushing Agendas:
The Consistency of Personal Failure and Mental Frailty in The Mist” in The
Films of Stephen King: From ‘Carrie’ to ‘The Mist.’ Ed. Tony Magistrale
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan), 204.
84. Breznican.
85. McAleer 219.
86. McAleer 218.
87. Stephen King, “What’s Scary” in Danse Macabre (New York: Gallery, 2010
[1981]), xxx.
88. Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror in Literature 28.
SECTION II
“A Literature of Cosmic Fear”:

Lovecraft, Criticism, and Literary
History
CHAPTER 6
“Lothly Thinges Thai Weren Alle”:

Imagining Horror in the Late Middle Ages
Helen Marshall
The popular medieval penitential treatise known as The Prick of Conscience

(c. 1330–50) makes an arresting attempt to correlate the contents of the
universe: demons of unspeakable ugliness, visions of death and the after-
life, the sinful clothed in blankets of vermin, apocalyptic fires scouring the
earth to create a gleaming, perfect world. The cosmology of its readers is
worlds away from that of the American writer, H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937),
a staunch atheist, who, having rejected the treacly didacticism of the
Victorian Age, detested any kind of art whose purpose was to edify or
instruct. He had a particular disdain for the literature of the Middle Ages.
In an immense letter written in February 1931 to fellow weird writer
Frank Belknap Long, he opines that “some former art attitudes—like sen-
timental romance, loud heroics, ethical didacticism, &c.—are so patently
hollow as to be visibly absurd & non-usable from the start.”1
An early version of this chapter was presented at the 36th International

Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts held in Orlando, March 18–22, 2015.
Both the research for this chapter and travel to the conferences were made
possible by a postdoctoral fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities
Research Council for which I am extremely grateful.
H. Marshall (*)
Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK

102 H. MARSHALL
Yet the descriptions which appear in The Prick of Conscience will seem
familiar to even the most casual reader of Lovecraft’s weird tales. I offer
one example below, in which hellish fiends descend upon the recently
dead to strip away their souls, to illustrate the point:
For when the lyf endeth of mon

Fendes shul gedre aboute hym thon
To reve fro hym his soule away
To pyne of helle that lasteth ay …
They are so blaake seyth the boke
And so lodly upon to looke
That alle the men of myddelerde
Of that syght shul ben aferde.
For alle that lyven in this lyve
Couthe not so lothely thing descrive …
So sly peyntoure never non was
Though he alle othur in sleyght couth passe
That couthe ymagyne hore uglynesse
Or peynt a poynte of hore lykenesse, …
For yif they had suche powere
In that fourme to shewe hem here
Oute of witte they wolde men fray
So orrible and so foule aren thay.
[For when the life of a man comes to its end, then fiends shall gather around
him to make off with his soul to the eternal pains of Hell … They are so black,
the book tells us, and so loathly to look upon that all the men of Middle
Earth [i.e. the world of mankind] are frightened of the sight of them. No
living man could describe such a loathly thing … Never has there been such
a painter, however ingenious he might be, who could imagine their ugliness
or paint their likeness, … for if [he] had such skills to show them in that form,
they would drive men out of their wits, so horrible and foul are they.]2
Here, the Conscience poet relies upon on a series of nebulous adjectives,

recognizing the failure of any artistic endeavor to represent the truly mon-
strous. “[L]othely” or “lodly” the poet repeats twice, a term which means,
according to the Middle English Dictionary, fearsome, detestable, and
obscene to behold.3 The repetition of this word, a commonplace in
Lovecraft’s lexicon, cannot help but call to mind the “vast, loathsome
shapes that seeped down from the dark stars” to inhabit the sunken city of
R’lyeh, terrible enough that their mere psychic residue was enough to
“LOTHLY THINGES THAI WEREN ALLE”: IMAGINING HORROR… 103
drive men mad in “The Call of Cthulhu” (1928).4 The narrator fears that
were the sciences to progress further in correlating the nature of the uni-
verse suggested by his vision, humanity would might only find “peace and
safety” in flight toward “a new dark age.”5
There is no indication that Lovecraft ever encountered The Prick of
Conscience, and, indeed, it would come as a great surprise to me if he had.
Although his essay Supernatural Horror in Literature (1927) claims that
medieval literature gave “an enormous impulse” toward the expression of
the weird tale, he depended heavily for many of his references to medieval
literature on Edith Birkhead’s monograph The Tale of Terror (1921).6 His
own contributions blur fact and fantasy, a tendency exemplified in the fol-
lowing passage where he argues that Western horror-lore depended on
the hidden but often suspected presence of a hideous cult of nocturnal wor-
shippers whose strange customs—descended from pre-Aryan and pre-
agricultural times when a squat race of Mongoloids roved over Europe with
their flocks and herds—were rooted in the most revolting fertility-rites of
immemorial antiquity.7
As much fodder as there is for critique here, it must be acknowledged that

Lovecraft is hardly the first writer to conflate the medieval with a represen-
tation of an ahistoric, mythic or superstitious past. Horror’s capacity to
disturb and distress, so Ken Gelder argues, depends upon a configuration,
which forces the archaic (the primal, primitive, and “frenzied subject of
excess”) to occupy the same territory as the modern (the rational, techno-
logical and moral subject).8 But while the Middle Ages might serve as
a useful symbol within fiction, it becomes more problematic when the
symbol is extrapolated too broadly. Here I find myself thinking of the
French critic Georges Bataille who theorized that when horror is transfig-
ured through an authentic artwork, it becomes “a pleasure, an intense
pleasure”—the pleasure of fixation, of ravishment without death—except
in the case of the religious imagery of hell in the Middle Ages, which,
attempting to reform its viewer, was “hardly separable from education.”9
Medievalists, predictably enough, have protested any sort of monolithic or
homogenous description of the Middle Ages, but they have nevertheless
failed to produce many accounts of their own to address the uses of horror
in medieval literature. Instead, they have largely recapitulated Bataille’s
point that there was “an exemplary purpose” at work in these texts, and
they were not intended “to chill the blood or entertain by frisson.”10
104 H. MARSHALL
But I find myself resistant to the impulse to categorically dismiss The

Prick of Conscience, a poem that produces horrific images of torture and
apocalyptic destruction. Why do we so fervently resist the notion that such
a text might possess the power to evoke “the more complete loss we
undergo in death,” as Bataille argues the true work of art does?11 Certainly,
there are few texts that go to greater lengths to evoke that loss. “The deth
… louseth alle thing,” [Death … unknots all things,] writes the Conscience
poet, it is “sotel and ryght pryvé” [subtle and very secret].12 He casts
Death in the guise of a monstrous figure, inexorable, unstoppable, and
ultimately unknowable:
Thus shal he viseten uch mon

And yit noon discreven hym con
There is noon undur heven ryche
That con telle what deth is lychee
[Thus he will visit every person, and yet no one can describe him. There is
no one under Heaven that who tell what Death is like.]13
Passages such as this seem to produce exactly the sort of “atmosphere of

breathless and unexplainable dread” that Lovecraft identifies as the hall-
mark of the weird tale.14 Although Lovecraft may have had misgivings
about the relevance of didactic literature to his project, his essay
Supernatural Horror in Literature offers surprising insights into the func-
tioning of medieval affective poetry. My aim in this chapter then is, firstly,
to broaden the history of supernatural horror to take better account of the
literature of the late Middle Ages in England, and, secondly, using
Lovecraft’s essay, to illuminate the literary effects—the “high spot[s]” of
emotional intensity, to use his turn of phrase—of one such text, The Prick
of Conscience.15
The Prick of Conscience: An Early Horror Text?

“Strange things happen when the discussion turns to violence,” claims
Jody Enders in the preface to her monograph, The Medieval Theater of
Cruelty: Rhetoric, Memory, Violence.16 She describes the range of reactions
she faced when she presented her work at conferences: anything from tit-
tering to outright laughter, mortification, anger, aversion and moral judg-
ment. Horror has long been a contested cultural mode, its pleasures
viewed as aberrant or compromising, a puzzle or paradox in need of

solving. Even scholars used to studying an age as “violent, tormented,
bewildered, suffering, and disintegrating” as the fourteenth century are
not immune to an initial feeling of distrust.17 The suspicion tending to
greet texts that treat horror has, I think, in many respects distorted the
reception of The Prick of Conscience. Despite the fact that it survives in
more copies than any other single Middle English poem of the period,
doubling the numbers of its contemporary, The Canterbury Tales by
Geoffrey Chaucer, it has received little attention until the present decade.18
Jean Jost remarks that its emphasis on “excruciatingly detailed physical
pain” is “excessive,” and most others have similarly written off the high
numbers as either a strange quirk of fate or, as Derek Pearsall puts it, “the
frustrations of a scrupulously historical enquiry.”19 But these remarks
point toward a more general problem in medieval studies at present. Even
in medieval genres of literature where horror is clearly recognized as a vital
component such as the affective meditations which I will discuss in more
detail below, scholars seem to lack the appropriate tools to talk about the
function of suffering and emotion without reducing these texts to sites of
either “affective excess” or “rhetorical crudity.”20 Lovecraft’s Supernatural
Horror in Literature provides a useful framework to do so.
The idea that The Prick of Conscience had any pleasures to offer has not
to my knowledge been explored.21 And while its grisly material might dis-
concert some modern readers, there is no question that The Prick of
Conscience appealed to a wide audience of parish priests, vicars and chantry
chaplains, canons, and even gentry readers.22 This is less surprising when
we consider that the early fourteenth century had witnessed a series of
social and economic catastrophes: the Great Famine of 1315–1322, the
recovery from which only occurred in the 1350s or 1360s; the beginning
of the Hundred Years’ War with France from 1337; and, most impor-
tantly, the outbreaks of the Black Death from 1348 onward. These crises
resulted in a substantial reduction of the literate population who had pre-
viously consumed literature predominantly in Latin or French. The radical
depopulation of the country allowed for shifts in the organization of ver-
nacular book production as well as the tastes of the reading population to
occur rapidly. The Prick of Conscience emerged in the fourteenth century
as part of a broader industry of pastoralia written in English, loosely
aligned with the programs of reform and pastoral care initiated in England
following the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 and Archbishop Pecham’s
1281 Council of Lambeth.23 Theologians and church leaders wrote and
106 H. MARSHALL
translated a wide range of literary aids to educate and edify local priests
and the souls under their charge: sermons, saints’ lives, expositions on
doctrinal matters, manuals of confession, and the like. In genre, The Prick
of Conscience sits somewhere between Chicken Soup for the Soul and the
mondo film series, Faces of Death (dir. Conan LeCilaire): a seven-part
guide designed to teach the reader to approach salvation through the con-
templation of the horrors of this world and the next.
The assessments of the critics I have been citing are not entirely without
basis. The Prick of Conscience is a text whose chief literary concern is hor-
ror, and through it, the ravishment that comes when the reader tiptoes up
to the very limits of a textual experience of death. And yet the didactic
parameters of the Conscience poet’s project are very different than modern
horror or even Lovecraft’s literature of cosmic fear. The Conscience poet
states in his prologue, that some readers understand what they are told,
but cannot feel dread because they only appreciate what they themselves
can see.24 But whoever reads The Prick of Conscience from start to finish,
the poet maintains, will “waxen lowe” [grow angry or depressed] and
“drede have therby / to knowe good and fle fooly” [experience dread as a
consequence of it so he will acknowledge what is good and flee from
folly].25 The Conscience poet accomplishes this task by using horrific imag-
ery to allow the reader to vividly visualize and imagine the corruption of
the body and the pains of Hell in order to push him toward what was
called in medieval Latin theology compunctio cordis or the repentance of
the heart, the initial recognition of sinfulness necessary to engage properly
in the sacrament of penance. These images were designed to excite within
readers who may have only an intellectual understanding of the Bible an
ecstatic psychological state in order that from that dread the true love of
God might begin.26
To accomplish this unsavory task, the Conscience poet obsesses over
images of bodily decay and torture, showing the same aesthetic interests as
the French Grand Guignol theater plays of the nineteenth century or the
slasher films of the 1980s. A single example ought to suffice to illuminate
the Conscience poet’s general method. The third book of The Prick of
Conscience is devoted to detailing the nature of death and the pain accom-
panying it. The text provides a schematic breakdown of the subject matter,
firstly explicating three kinds of death (ghostly, endless, and bodily) and
then identifying the four kinds of dread that accompany death (the pain of
death, the grisly sight of fiends, the judgment of our lives, and our lack of
knowledge about whether we shall go to Hell or Heaven). The poet illus-
trates each point with a single, particularly vivid image that would adhere
in the mind of the reader. When describing the pain of death, the first of
these necessary fears, he proffers a visceral extended metaphor that he says
he has drawn from an unidentified philosopher:
He lyckeneth monnes lyf to a tree

That grewed yif hit myght so bee
Out of a monnes herte to spryng
And wrapped were with herte stryng,
The crop oute at his mouthe he bere
And to uche fote a rote faste were
And every veyn of his body
Had a roote fastened ther by;
Uche toe and fyngur on hand
Had a roote ther inne growand
And every lyme on uche a syde
With dyverse rotes were occupyde,
And yif that tree then were pulled oute
At ones with alle the rotes aboute
The rotus shuld then rise therwith
Evere veyn, senewe, and lyth
A more peyne couthe no mon cast
Then hit were while that hit laste …
[He (i.e. the philosopher) likens man’s life to a tree that grows out of his
heart, with his heart-string wrapped around it, the crop growing out of his
mouth and a root fastened to each foot and fastened to each vein also, with
roots growing into each toe and finger of his hand and roots of various kinds
clinging to his limbs on either side. And if that tree were suddenly pulled
out, so that the roots, veins, sinews and joints all tore free, then no greater
pain could a man feel than this while it lasted …]27
Upon reading this passage, I can easily imagine the reader cringing, shud-
dering, or shrinking away, and the critic Howell Chickering observes that
it would have been enough to have “made a believer’s skin crawl.”28 He
proceeds to argue that passages such as these operate only at the most
basic level by shocking their audience into the empty fear (timor vanis) or
the fear of punishment for proper penitence. But this perspective is too
distanced, I think, and too focused upon the poem’s didactic purpose. It
neglects the genuine fascination, the terrifying attraction, the potential
seductiveness a text like The Prick of Conscience might have offered to
108 H. MARSHALL
those desperate to come to terms with the nature of their bodies and their
place within a complex and incomprehensible universe. An understanding
of the text’s operations on purely theological grounds does not fully
account for the effects of the poem, which are, I will argue, more subtle
and potentially pleasurable than typically imagined. As the Conscience poet
makes clear in his conclusion, dread alone “es noght medeful to prufe” [is
not advantageous to experience] if it “accordes noght halely with that
lufe” [does not accord entirely with that love], and consequently it must
be “lufes brother” [love’s brother].29 These lines suggest that dread and
love do not share an obverse relationship, but rather they are intercon-
nected, and the experience of one may in fact lead to the experience of
other. This provocative combination of pain and ravishment, the latter of
which has been ignored in accounts of The Prick of Conscience, is instanti-
ated within a great deal of literature from the period. In the section that
follows I will examine the medieval theories of affective horror that under-
gird meditational and devotional texts like The Prick of Conscience to dem-
onstrate that their pleasures have much in common with those of the
weird tales championed by Lovecraft.
Violence, Pain, and Other Paradoxical Pleasures

“Because we remember pain and the menace of death more vividly than
pleasure,” Lovecraft writes, “and because our feelings toward the benefi-
cent aspects of the unknown have from the first been captured and formal-
ized by conventional religious rituals, it has fallen to the lot of the darker
and more maleficent side of cosmic mystery to figure chiefly in our popu-
lar supernatural folklore.”30 In this passage, Lovecraft comes startlingly
close to describing an important aspect of medieval literary and religious
culture: affective piety. Medieval literary culture had a well-developed sys-
tem for addressing the relationship between the textual experience of pain
and pleasure. This strain of piety emerged in the eleventh and early twelfth
centuries and continued to develop in richness and variety throughout the
subsequent three centuries. Much of it had to do with certain mnemonic
techniques, initially used by monks who wished to meditate upon and fill
the storehouses of their memory with narratives, allegories, and images
from the Bible. The act of meditatio was a profound process of self-
reflection in which a monk slowly and repetitively read aloud portions of
the Bible in order to commit them to memory and to ruminate upon their
deeper meaning. And Lovecraft was remarkably astute in noting that
images associated with death and pain were far more likely to lodge them-
selves in the minds of those engaging in this meditative process.
One of the most popular and influential modes of affective meditation
invited readers to reflect upon exceptionally gory accounts of Christ’s suf-
fering upon the cross. Texts of this kind were the “major psychological
narratives” of the later Middle Ages, and by the early fifteenth-century
devotional treatises of this kind were owned and read more than any other
kind of English book.31 They aimed to teach their readers, through itera-
tive performances, how to relate to the suffering of others and, conse-
quently, how to develop a proper Christian ethos. A brief example will
demonstrate the nature of the genre. In the first half of the fourteenth
century, the English hermit Richard Rolle composed a number of affective
treatises for a limited circle of aristocrats, lay religious, and anchoresses.
His particular blend of affective piety emphasized a threefold path to per-
fection in which the reader was encouraged to adhere to the basic tenets
of the Christian faith, renounce worldly attachments in imitation of Christ,
and, lastly, become enkindled with the fire of Christ’s love.32 In Meditation
B, Rolle provides a highly charged account of the Passion:
I see your body on the cross all bloody and strained so that the joint pull
apart; now your wounds open, your skin is completely ripped and gapes so
wide, your head is crowned with thorns, your body is all wounds, nails [are]
in your hands and feet so tender, and in your sinews there is a most painful
feeling. There is no support for your head; your body is strained like a parch-
ment skin on a rack; your face is swollen that once was so fair; your joints are
undone; you stand and hang on nails; streams of blood run down from the
cross; the sight of your mother increases your pain.33
Rolle believed that his readers would discover great sweetness when rumi-
nating upon passages such as these. In The Melody of Love, he describes the
pleasures of a contemplative life of such meditation, advocating it as the
very best and most secure way of living because it allowed one “to feel in
advance the eternal sweetness, to sing the delights of eternal love and to
be snatched in the praise of the Creator by the infusion of song in jubila-
tion.”34 For Rolle and his circle, the delights of eternal love—fire (fervor),
sweetness (dulcor), and song (canor)—were very real. Rolle conveys the
excitement these feelings created in him in a dramatic passage in the Latin
text, The Fire of Love:
110 H. MARSHALL
I was more greatly amazed than I can tell when for the first time I truly felt
my heart growing hot, and blazing in a real not an imaginary way, as if with
a palpable flame … And when I knew that it boiled up only from within, and
that this kindling of love was not caused by the flesh nor by concupiscence—
from which I learned that it was a gift of the Maker—I melted joyfully into
an emotion of greater love; and chiefly because of the influx of the sweetest
of delights and of inner sweetnesses, which with that same spiritual ignition
bedewed my soul to the very marrow.35
And lest one think such behavior was hyperbolic, it was exactly this sort of
loud wailing and extreme behavior that would cause trouble for the reli-
gious eccentric Margery Kempe (ca. 1373–1438) who dictated her story
to a fellow Englishman in the 1420s and then later, in 1436, persuaded a
local priest to rewrite it.36 Her weeping seems to have sprung from an
ecstatic penitence for her own sins, for the sins of the world, and compas-
sion for the suffering of Christ.37
But this style of meditation was not limited to a narrow range of
religious readers. A variety of late medieval treatises encouraged laymen
and laywomen to pursue these experiences. The Contemplations of the
Dread and Love of God was one such popular text addressed to a general
audience.38 It proposed a spiritual path adapted from the work of Richard
Rolle, with close enough parallels that the English printer Wynkyn de
Work attributed it to Rolle in his 1506 and 1519 editions.39 The title of
this text immediately recalls The Prick of Conscience’s aim to “pryck her
soule withinne / So of that drede may love bygynne” [prick their souls so
that love may begin out of dread].40 The Prick of Conscience bears strong
connections with this tradition. Although now generally regarded as
anonymous by scholars, much like The Contemplations of the Dread and
Love of God, it was absorbed into the canon of Rolle’s English works. Five
fourteenth-century manuscripts assign authorship to him.41
Although the Conscience poet does not offer an image of the Passion
for meditative purposes, nevertheless, his text borrows heavily from the
general praxis associated with affective piety. Like Rolle, he deploys a series
of vivid images designed to encourage the reader to experience, within a
fictive framework, the pains of death and the torments of Hell. In the sixth
book of The Prick of Conscience, the poet outlines the 15 torments of Hell
which include, among others, fire, coldness, stink and filth, hunger,
unbearable thirst, and eternal darkness. The eighth pain, which addresses
the presence of vermin, is particularly unsettling:
The eyghte peyne the boke seyth us

Is orrible vermyn and venymus
Whiche shul on the synful rouke
Ever on hem to gnawe and souke,
As grisly dragouns and neddres kene
And toodes so foule we nevere noon sene …
For they dyd here ageyn Godes law
Wod vermyn shul hem there gnaw …
They shul with vermyn covered be
So that no lyme shal hem be fre
And on hem shul thay be gnowand
Whethur so they sitte or stande
The vermyn shal be here clothyng
And vermyn shal be here beddyng …
[The eighth pain, so the book tells us, is horrible vermin and venomous
creatures which shall crouch on the sinful and gnaw and suck upon them for
eternity, as grisly dragons and adders can, and toads that are so foul we have
never seen the like of them … For they acted against God’s law, and so mad
vermin shall gnaw upon them … They shall be covered with vermin so that
no limb is untouched, and [the vermin] shall gnaw upon them whether they
sit or stand. The vermin shall be their clothing, and vermin shall be their
bedding …]42
Terrifying images such as this one, which anticipates the hellish bone-filled
cavern beneath Exham Priory in Lovecraft’s story “The Rats in the Walls”
(1924), were a useful part of a particular meditative technique in which
readers engaged in mnemonic exercises using images drawn from violent,
biblical themes.
Building up one’s memory was considered a craft as much as it was
considered an art, and there were tools that had been designed in order to
assist monks with the process. Lovecraft’s notion of the memorable frag-
ments of earlier works takes on an additional resonance when considered
in this context. The basic principles of ars memorativa treatises were thus:
firstly, these texts recommended that the material to be memorized should
be divided up into short segments, so that very long works could be read-
ily retained and securely recovered out of chains of these short segments.
Secondly, these short segments were often attached to schematic images,
often referred to as “pictures” [picturae], which were said to be painted in
one’s mind.43 The treatises often stress the need to create personal connec-
tions with the materials or to color them with emotions. Fear, violence,
112 H. MARSHALL
and sensuality were frequently linked in this tradition, as authors created

images drawn from violent, biblical themes to push the reader toward the
compunctio cordis required for medieval meditation.44 An anonymous
Carthusian monk of the fifteenth century, for example, counseled readers
to use frightful images of people who had been hanged or decapitated, as
these would be the most arresting. Worried that the monks may take plea-
sure from executing only their enemies in these reveries, he immediately
cautioned that these poor, tortured souls ought to be friends and relatives
as well as enemies.45
Consider also the twelfth-century Carthusian monk, Adam of Dryburgh,
who developed a threefold system for contemplation, which consisted of
meditation on the form of God, his terrible punishments of the damned,
and at last the joys of Heaven. The second part, most relevant for us,
involved a literary and spiritual exercise in which readers contemplated the
moment when the soul separates from the body, the decayed and worm-
ridden state of the body after death, the Resurrection and judgment of the
dead, and the penalties awaiting the damned. They then were instructed
to imagine themselves within those images so they could sublimate and
accommodate the experience before moving on to the final section, which
focused on the contemplation of Heaven.46 His language stresses the visual
nature of these horrific images:
I see these things, Lord my God. I see these things, I say, and I am afraid. I
consider these things and I quake with fear. I behold these things and in your
hands I tremble, O righteous and hidden God: hidden and righteous.47
The moment of judgment draws special attention. He urges the reader to
paint the moving powers of heavens, the burning heavens and lands, and
that frightful and dreadful vengeance which he will exercise on the repro-
bate … Let [your meditations] see that land the external penalties of the
reprobate, the infernal Gehenna, where the fire will be inextinguishable, the
worm immortal …48
The fifth book of The Prick of Conscience, the longest book of the entire
treatise, is entirely devoted to detailing Judgment Day and the signs that
will announce its coming. The passage, which describes the fire that will
consume the world, is particularly evocative:
At the ende of the worlde byfore the dom

An hidouse fyre byfore shal com
That sodeynly the worlde shal bryn
And no thing spare that is therin, …
This fyur that of the worlde shal ryse
Shal then come fro dyverse partyse:
The fyur above withouten were
And undur erthe and above here
Shul mete togedur at ones thon
And holy brenne beest and mon,
And alle that groweth in erthe and eyre
Til alle be clensed and made feyre.
[At the end of the world before judgment, a hideous fire shall come so that
suddenly the world shall burn and nothing shall be spared. This fire that
comes from the earth shall rise up and appear from different parts: the fire
above and outside and under the earth shall meet together at once and com-
pletely burn all beasts and men, and everything that grows in the earth and
the air until all are cleansed and made beautiful.]49
The images from this particular book of The Prick of Conscience were so
evocative that a fifteenth-century stained glass window was created to
depict them—specifically the 15 signs of Doomsday—in All Saints North
Street, York, each accompanied by a variant of the words of the poem.50
There, churchgoers could easily visualize the horrors to come and think
upon their own sinfulness.
I have in my discussion thus far sketched out the relationship between
The Prick of Conscience and affective meditations and mnemonic tech-
niques. I have shown that many of these techniques involved readers
imagining brutal and horrific moments of violence and then identifying
with or inserting themselves into those narratives in order to intensify their
feelings. In this sense, a text like The Prick of Conscience acts as an “emo-
tion machine” to use Ed Tan’s term: it generates powerful negative emo-
tional responses, and it does so through strategies analyzed in modern
cognitive theories of affect.51 What interests me is how in many cases the
ecstatic sublimation of fear invoked by violent mental images comes as a
result a final liberating turn to the joys of Heaven. The Prick of Conscience
makes this move as well—but should we say that the only pleasure that the
text offers is in the final section? Or might we imagine that the emotional
“high points” of the text (and I have shown several examples) were in and
of themselves pleasurable?
114 H. MARSHALL
Art-Horror and Medieval Emotion Machines

Both medieval and modern scholars such as Lovecraft himself have been
slow to recognize a potential continuity in the treatment of horror in lit-
erature over the centuries and have subsequently neglected early texts
when addressing how certain effects are produced.52 The exclusion persists
as a result of two premises: firstly, if the horror literature is taken as arising
from a set of recognizable tropes, then these tropes largely originate within
Gothic literature; secondly, and perhaps more intriguingly, the fear of the
supernatural exploited in horror literature is particularly calibrated to a
post-1750 world in which the scientifically minded thinkers of the
Enlightenment relegated the supernatural to “a figment of the imagina-
tion.”53 During the medieval period, these arguments imply, the super-
natural would have been taken as an extension of reality, and, consequently,
any form of affect generated by narratives dependent upon it would be of
a markedly different kind. Andrew Joynes, in his introduction to an edi-
tion collecting medieval ghost stories, remarks,
Today, the effect of a story of the supernatural is frequently enhanced by the

fact that it runs counter to the supposedly rational tenor of modern culture.
In the Middle Ages, a time of unquestioning religious faith, a ghost story
often had an exemplary purpose and was intended to evoke a wondering
response from its listeners.54
The supposition that medieval people had an “unquestioning religious

faith” allows critics to collapse or confuse distinctions between the natural
or true horror such as plagues and warfare with otherworldly horrors such
as demons. For medieval audiences, they argue, these horrors were all
potentially plausible. Indeed, Lovecraft makes a similar point when he sug-
gests medieval readers had “a most unquestioning faith in every form of the
supernatural; from the gentlest of Christian doctrines to the most mon-
strous morbidities of witchcraft and black magic.”55 Consequently, these
texts tend to be dismissed by modern critics who believe that narratives with
some grounding in actual horror cannot lead to pleasurable emotions.56
The philosopher Robert C. Solomon, for example, argues that although we
might ask what pleasure a moviegoer would experience in a horror film, it
“makes no sense at all” to ask such a question of a real horrific event such as
September 11, which does not involve a liberating “epistemic uncertainty.”57
For Solomon, audiences only experience enjoyment when a text is “‘mixed’
and compromised” or presented as “make-believe.”58
Critics who follow this line of thinking might argue that a text such as
The Prick of Conscience could not evoke pleasure because it lacked a nec-
essary fictive distance which would relax moral judgments and free its
readers from the need to take action or responsibility for their aberrant
emotional responses to suffering. This position tends to be strengthened
when textual representations of violence within The Prick of Conscience
are conflated with the ongoing “real” horror of the outbreaks of the
Black Death. Jonathan Hughes argues that the author of The Prick of
Conscience was more effective than anyone else in instilling a fear of dying
in those with un-confessed sins in times of sickness and danger.59 But
while it is tempting to link the composition of The Prick of Conscience to
the emergence of the Black Death, it must also be remembered that cur-
rent theories of authorship date the composition of the poem to the
1330s, some decades before the first major outbreak in 1348–1349.60 As
a result, the original context of writing likely does not reflect an aware-
ness of the outbreak of plague, even if this environment intensified the
popularity of the text post-1350. A historical reading of the text in the
light of the catastrophes of the fourteenth century may yield many
rewards, but one of the side effects of this approach is that it also obfus-
cates our understanding of the potentially pleasurable function of the text
in and of itself. To look for literary strategies designed to produce plea-
sure out of genuinely horrific events seems to risk trivializing the horren-
dous nature of those catastrophes.
In the discussion that follows, I want to push back against some of
these assumptions to sketch out some possible avenues for understanding
the specifically textual pleasures that The Prick of Conscience may have
offered its readers. In doing so, I argue that The Prick of Conscience uses
strategies quite similar to modern horror texts to ravish its readers with the
intensity of the emotions it generates. Lovecraft’s account of “weird” fic-
tion makes a valuable connection between religious texts and tales of cos-
mic horror. He argues that “the thrill of the chimney-corner whisper or
the lonely wood” is grounded in a psychological pattern or tradition
“coeval with the religious feeling and closely related to many aspects of
it.”61 While I hesitate to suggest that the purpose or ultimate use of the
sensations within the text is the same, like Lovecraft, I believe that the
emotionally heightened state produced by devotional or penitential texts
is analogous in some ways to the kinds of pleasure generated by modern
horror texts.
116 H. MARSHALL
Noël Carroll’s theory of art-horror, which he develops in his mono-

graph The Philosophy of Horror, offers a useful starting point for under-
standing how textual representations of horror create specific kinds of
pleasure in their audiences. He differentiates between what he calls “natu-
ral horror” (ecological disaster, genocide, and the like) and the horror that
appears in fine art, radio programs, films, and novels, more specifically, the
products of a specific genre. That genre can be identified by the inclusion
of a particular object—a monster—that elicits fear and repulsion because
it is impure and violates categorical distinctions (i.e. living/dead). It is not
the combination of fear and repulsion of these categorical violations that
are inherently pleasurable—these, he admits “[exact] a little discomfort in
exchange for greater pleasure”62—but rather the narrative itself which
revolves around the drama of the discovery or disclosure of an object that
is, in principle, unknowable.
Some aspects of The Prick of Conscience are elucidated by using an
account such as this. Although the text itself is not narrative in focus, a
potential problem, it does broadly stage a drama of discovery in which
otherwise unknowable beings—fiends, for example—are revealed and
explained to the reader. However, Carroll argues that one can only experi-
ence art-horror with respect to a fictive monster, an entity “not now
believed to exist according to reigning scientific notions.”63 His account
specifically excludes the Middle Ages because the cosmology of the period
included witches, demons, werewolves, and spectral forces as a part of
reality, and, consequently, could not provoke the necessary sense of natu-
ral violation.64 Carroll’s definition of monsters that fascinate has been chal-
lenged in recent critical theory, and here I add my own objections that this
position represents an overly simplified understanding of medieval
thought.65 Even if spectral forces were more easily regarded as part of real-
ity, this belief was not universal. Robert Bartlett argues that conceptions of
homogenized medieval belief systems prejudge the issue. There are many
cases when anomalies and inconsistencies in paradigms of belief are
revealed: conceptions of the “natural” and the “supernatural” caused
intellectual discomfort in the Middle Ages.66 At the very least, it must be
acknowledged that the programs of reform and pastoral care which
prompted the writing of The Prick of Conscience came about in large part
because the tenets of faith were not as widely understood as was desired.
In the Prologue, the Conscience poet states explicitly that a lack of
knowledge prevents readers from experiencing the appropriate feelings
toward the perils they should dread and flee.67
If we modify Carroll’s theory to consider creatures which may be gen-

erally believed to exist, yet still remained unknown or impossible to appre-
hend except through the mediation of texts, then it might be the case that
the reader took some pleasure in coming to a greater understanding of
these monstrous entities who were the object of their fascination and curi-
osity. Nevertheless, Carroll’s account does not provide an adequate under-
standing of the presence of passages designed to intensify the apprehension
of pain. For Carroll, disgust and fear do not coexist with pleasure, but
rather those emotions, unpleasant in and of themselves, are simply neces-
sary for the generation of the latter. But in the case of The Prick of
Conscience, surely the experiences of disgust and fear would have exceeded
their necessary function; consequently, we are left in a position of agreeing
with those scholars who saw its methods as crude and excessive. The plea-
sures taken when the reader explores the natures of monsters seem rather
weak if one then accepts the reality of those monsters. It might be coun-
tered that a more pleasurable process of discovery is the revelation that,
although these pains exist, they might be mitigated by an appropriate
penitential process.
An account which integrates the experience of fear and pleasure would
be preferable. In this respect, Matt Hills’ cognitive-based approach is bet-
ter. He maintains that horror ought to be regarded as an aesthetic, fic-
tional exercise.68 Hills rejects Carroll’s dependency upon an object-oriented
approach, in which a single feature of the text—the monster, for example—
provokes a response. He also rejects the definition of an emotion as
“occurrent” (i.e. taking place only in direct response rather than a linger-
ing effect like a disposition of mood). He suggests that horror involves not
just an outward-focused emotional reaction to textual content, but also
introspection over emotional and affective states. In his modified theory,
horror texts shift between object-oriented emotions and objectless affects
such as edginess or anxiety. These texts function as “emotion machines”
for constructing both affects and emotions and transforming one into
another.69 The pleasure of a horror text comes, in this theory, from the
transformation of experienced affect into emotion and vice versa, as objects
attach themselves to pre-existing affects and as emotions become detached
from objects (as, for example, when a monster disappears from the screen
or page) and are converted into the “affective saturation” of an unsettling
mood or edgy ambience.70 Hills’ modified theory might explain, then,
how the crises of the fourteenth century conditioned a heightened reac-
tion to The Prick of Conscience. Anticipatory reading and its mood is a
118 H. MARSHALL
crucial part of an affective theory of reading. Yvonne Leffler, for instance,

argues for the significance of vague “pre-figurings” within a text, whereby
a threat presented within the diegesis of the text is later made actual.71
Hills would caution against this approach, arguing that these anticipatory
states are “textually derived” and “forward-looking” rather than “recap-
ping anxious moods felt outside the aesthetic text-audience encounter.”72
However, it seems to me that in cases where the anxieties of the text mir-
ror anxieties that be experienced outside the text, Hills’ objection has less
force.
If we follow Hills’ theory, one of the pleasures offered by a text such as
The Prick of Conscience might be the transformation of objectless affect to
object-oriented emotion as the text worked to crystallize anxieties sur-
rounding the suddenness and unpredictability of death into specific, evoca-
tive images. The first book of The Prick of Conscience, for example, describes
the wretchedness of mankind. It outlines all the phases of life (birth, mid-
dle age, and old age) followed by the nature of his death. In this final sec-
tion, the Conscience poet provides an extraordinarily detailed description of
the tokens by which death might be recognized in a sick person:
His fronnt bygynneth doun to falle

And his browes goon doune with alle;
His lyfte yghe semeth welle lesse
And narower then the ryght yghe esse.
His nese cop is sharpe with alle,
Then bygynneth his chin to falle,
His pouns ben stille with out styryng,
His feet gyn coolde his body gyn clyng,
And yif ny deth is a yong monne
He waketh and may nought slepe thon.
[His forehead begins to fall down, and his brows begin to fall; his left eye
shrinks and becomes narrower than the right eye. His nose tip grows very
sharp, and then his chin begins to fall as well. His pulse grows still and will
not stir. His feet grown cold, and his body begins to shrivel up. And if death
is near a young man then he wakens and cannot sleep.]73
The anxiety the text has provoked in its reader, combined with any exter-
nal, intensifying anxiety, could here be focalized around the single provoca-
tive image of a dying man. This model aligns neatly with Jonathan Hughes’
account of the purpose of The Prick of Conscience as a penitential tool:
By evoking the terrors of sudden and painful death, writers on confession

opposed to this arbitrary force the hard certainties of a penitential system that
exerted an iron grip on penitents in this world and the next. The physical
terrors of death were shown to be manifestations of a troubled conscience,
and their alleviation was only possible through the sacrament of penance.74
Here, the objectless affect—“the terrors of sudden and painful death”—

transforms into “the hard certainties” of the text’s penitential system, and,
consequently, becomes easier to process and manage. This approach does
not reduce the horrific imagery within the text to an account of “real”
horror or didactic purpose, which might be dismissed as lacking in artistry;
instead, it reveals how the Conscience poet used specific literary techniques
still in order to enhance the complex emotional effects of his text.
In this section, I have laid out in brief several modern cognitive-based
models that expose some of the paradoxical pleasures of The Prick of
Conscience. On the one hand, an adjusted version of Carroll’s model
would locate the pleasure of the text in its ability to reveal the nature of
the monstrous beings who torment the sinful in the afterlife as essentially
pleasurable; on the other hand, Hills’ model would posit the text as an
“emotion machine” for converting the objectless anxiety provoked by the
crises of the fourteenth century into the concretized and targeted dread
necessary for the text’s psychosomatic penitential program. And yet it
must be admitted that if these represent the only pleasures the text has to
offer then they still seem rather troubling. For one, while The Prick of
Conscience has an aesthetic component, it does not operate with the same
degree of fictionality as the horror texts studied by both Carroll and Hills.
Modern horror texts may leave the reader with a lingering sense of unease
or indeterminacy if they have been particularly effective, yet they still
depend upon the eventual dissipation of these affects as the reader’s cogni-
tive faculties reject the reality of the narrative. Here we reach a crux: the
Conscience poet’s project requires that the material presented in the text
be taken as authoritative and genuine rather than fictional, and so the final
release from the realm of horror ought not to take place. Indeed, the
Conscience poet may well have intended the reader to sustain feelings of
dread and horror long after the text had been read. In this sense, then, The
Prick of Conscience tends to resemble postmodern horror texts such as The
Blair Witch Project (1999, dir. Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez),
which makes use of apparently “found footage” to claim the authenticity
for the text, rejecting conventions that allow for closure. The horror of
120 H. MARSHALL
such tales bleeds over into reality, leaving the audience in doubt as to
whether what they saw was genuine or fictional. As Isabel Cristina Pinedo
argues, these texts confront us with epistemic uncertainty: “We only know
that we do not know.”75
The Prick of Conscience is a disruptive poem, one of the first horror texts
of widespread appeal in England. It is a text designed to unsettle its readers,
to challenge their sense of the universe and their own place within it, and by
doing so, to mingle dread and fervor in a series of intense moments of tex-
tual ravishment. This same disruptive practice is a feature of Lovecraft’s
writing, which is obsessed with undermining traditional forms of knowledge
and dramatizing in stark and frightening detail the intrinsic unknowability
of the world his characters inhabit. The horrific effects of weird tales such as
“The Call of Cthulhu,” which I cited at the very beginning of this chapter,
rely upon the audience’s epistemic uncertainty. They suggest that our ability
to correlate the contents of the universe is flawed. Should we glimpse the
“terrifying vistas of reality” that exist beyond the realm of scientific compre-
hension, only madness—or perhaps fanaticism—awaits us. But the disrup-
tive effects of weird tales such as this only occur when they resist rationalization
and explanation.76 The Prick of Conscience contains a similar indigestible ker-
nel at its core, an element that cannot easily be resolved through the study
of historical causes or by recourse to the kind of “smirking optimism”
Lovecraft himself despised in didactic literature. The Prick of Conscience gri-
maces where other texts might grin, it terrifies, but it also seems to take a
strange satisfaction in unfolding the manifold miseries of its vision of the
afterlife, it exudes delight in its sheer excessiveness. The account I have
offered of the text’s complicated emotional machinery is necessarily partial,
and has touched only in passing on popular belief, definitions of “natural”
and “supernatural” in medieval thought, and the role of religious texts in
mediating evolving notions of cosmology. But even this partial account
demonstrates that the study of horror literature might be usefully broad-
ened to include texts written before the eighteenth century. When modern
critics dismiss medieval literature as purely didactic, they dispose too readily
of a huge body of work capable of both illuminating and complicating the
paradoxical pleasures of horror. For although Lovecraft himself may have
been deeply skeptical of medieval texts such as The Prick of Conscience, the
unprecedented resurgence in the popularity of his critical and creative writ-
ing offers an exciting opportunity to re-examine texts of a similar vein, sepa-
rated by hundreds of years, but linked in their shared apprehensions about
the nature of the cosmos and humanity’s place within it.
Notes
1. H. P. Lovecraft to Frank Belknap Long, 22 February 1931 in Selected
Letters III (1929–1931), edited by August Derleth and James Turner (Sauk
City, WI: Arkham House Publishers, Inc., 1971), 293; quoted in S. T.
Joshi, A Dreamer and a Visionary: H.P. Lovecraft in His Time Joshi
(Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2001), 298. Bryant Brantley stud-
ies both Lovecraft’s aversion to the Middle Ages and his links with it in
“H. P. Lovecraft’s ‘Unnameable’ Middle Ages” in Medieval Afterlives in
Popular Culture, edited by Gail Ashton, and Daniel T. Kline (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 113–127.
2. James H. Morey, ed., Prik of Conscience (Kalamazoo, Michigan: Medieval
Institute Publications, 2012), 3:499–591. All modern translations of the
original Middle English are my own.
3. “Lothli (adj.).” Middle English Dictionary. Accessed April 14, 2015.
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/m/mec/med-idx?type=id&id=
MED26162
4. H. P. Lovecraft, “The Call of Cthulhu” in The Call of Cthulhu and Other
Weird Stories, edited by S. T. Joshi (New York: Penguin Classics, 2002),
165.
5. Ibid., 139.
6. H. P. Lovecraft, The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature, edited
by S. T. Joshi (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2000), 29.
7. Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror, 29–30. This rather outmoded idea, which
S. T. Joshi offhandedly remarks “is no longer accepted by anthropologists”
(103, n. 5), likely came from Margaret A. Murray’s The Witch-Cult in
Western Europe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1921).
8. Ken Gelder, “Introduction” in The Horror Reader (London: Routledge,
2002), 3.
9. Georges Bataille, “The Cruel Practice of Art” (1949). “L’Art, exercise de
la cruauté” was originally published in Médicine de France 4 (1949): 21–7
and reprinted in Georges Bataille, Oeuvres Complètes, vol. XI (Paris:
Gallimard, 1988). This translation first appeared on the CD-ROM BLAM!
1 (1993) and was revised for supervert.com
10. Andrew Joynes, ed., Medieval Ghost Stories (Woodbridge, England: Boydell
Press, 2001), xii
11. Bataille.
12. Morey, 3:125–27.
13. Ibid., 3:125–31.
14. Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror, 24.
15. Ibid.
122 H. MARSHALL
16. Jody Enders, The Medieval Theater of Cruelty: Rhetoric, Memory, Violence
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), xi.
17. Barbara W Tuchman, A Distant Mirror (New York: Knopf, 1978), xiii.
18. Lewis and McIntosh identified 120 manuscripts and fragments in A
Descriptive Guide to the Manuscripts of the Prick of Conscience (Oxford:
Society for the Study of Mediaeval Languages and Literature, 1982). Ralph
Hanna III has recently suggested the number may be as high as 170 in
“Two New Manuscript Fragments of Speculum Vitae,” Journal of the Early
Book Society 16 (2013): 193–98. These numbers can be compared to the
81 manuscripts of The Canterbury Tales identified by Michael Sargent in
“What Do the Numbers Mean? A Textual Critic’s Observations on Some
Patterns of Middle English Manuscript Transmission” which appears in
Design and Distribution of Late Medieval Manuscripts in England, edited
by Margaret Connolly and Linne Mooney (York: York Medieval Press,
2008), 206. The Prick of Conscience has begun to undergo a re-evaluation,
in part because of the publication of two new editions, the first by James
H. Morey which I have cited from throughout, and the second by Hanna
and Sarah Woods: Richard Morris’s Prick of Conscience: A Corrected and
Amplified Reading Text (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
Contributing to this, Moira Fitzgibbons has produced two articles which
address The Prick of Conscience as a literary text, rather than focusing on
the linguistic data it might provide: “Enabled and Disabled ‘Myndes’ in
The Prick of Conscience” in Medieval Poetics and Social Practice: Responding
to the Work of Penn R. Szittya, edited by Seeta Chaganti (New York:
Fordham University Press, 2012), 72–94 and “Critical Pleasure, Visceral
Literacy, and the Prik of Conscience,” Pedagogy 13 (2013): 245–266.
Daniel Sawyer has also identified fragments of another Conscience manu-
script in “Rediscovered Manuscript Fragments of The Prick of Conscience in
the Library of Queens’ College, Cambridge,” Transactions of the Cambridge
Bibliographical Society (forthcoming).
19. Jean Jost remarks that its emphasis on “excruciatingly detailed physical
pain … plays an excessive role” in “Afterlife in the Southern Recension,”
typescript 10; quoted in Howell Chickering, “Rhetorical Stimulus in the
Prick of Conscience” in Medieval Paradigms, edited by Jeremy duQuesnay
Adams and Stephanie A Hayes-Healy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2005), 209. Derek Pearsall’s quotation appears in Derek Pearsall, Old
English and Middle English Poetry (London; Boston: Routledge & K. Paul,
1977), 139.
20. Anne Clark Bartlett and Thomas Howard Bestul, “Introduction” in
Cultures of Piety: Medieval English Devotional Literature in Translation
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 3–4.
21. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne et al., eds., The Idea of the Vernacular: An

Anthology of Middle English Literary Theory, 1280–1520 (University Park,
PA.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), 241.
22. See Alexandra Barratt’s description of the ownership of Conscience manu-
scripts in “Spiritual Writings and Religious Instruction,” in The Cambridge
History of the Book in Britain, Vol. II: 1100–1400, edited by Nigel Morgan
and Rodney M. Thomson (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008),
358–359.
23. Mary Elizabeth O’Carroll, A Thirteenth-Century Preacher’s Handbook:
Studies in MS Laud Misc. 511 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute for Mediaeval
Studies, 1997), 1.
24. Morey, Entre: 282–286.
25. Ibid., Entre: 320–21.
26. Ibid., Entre: 331.
27. Ibid., 3:226–243.
28. Chickering, 212.
29. Morey, 7: 1807–1815.
31. Jennifer Bryan, Looking Inward: Devotional Reading and the Private Self
in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
2008), 110.
32. William F. Hodapp, “Richard Rolle’s Passion Meditations in the Context
of His English Epistles: Imitatio Christi and the Three Degrees of Love,”
Mystics Quarterly 20 (1994), pp. 96–104 (100).
33. Richard Rolle, “Meditation B” in Richard Rolle: Prose and Verse, edited
by S. J. Ogilvie-Thomson, EETS 293 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1988), 377–38.
34. The Latin reads: “Sed melius est, securius est, suavius contemplatorem
esse, eternam suivitatem presentire, delicias canere eterni amoris et in lau-
dem rapi Conditoris per infusionem conoris iubilei” from Melos Amoris:
152.6–154.19. Qtd in Nicholas Watson, Richard Rolle and the Invention
of Authority, 183.
35. Richard Rolle, Incendium Amoris, 145.1–147.32 (need proper citation);
qtd in Nicholas Watson, Richard Rolle, 114.
36. Cf. The Book of Margery Kempe, edited by Lynn Staley (Kalamazoo, MI:
Medieval Institute Publications, 1996).
37. Santha Bhattacharji examines the Western medieval tradition of religious
weeping, and its controversial nature, in “Tears and Screaming: Weeping in
the Spirituality of Margery Kempe” in Holy Tears: Weeping in the Religious
Imagination edited by Kimberley Christine Patton and John Stratton
Hawley (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005): 229–240.
124 H. MARSHALL
38. Margaret Connolly, ed., Contemplations of the Dread and Love of God
(Oxford: Oxford University Press for the Early English Text Society,
1993), 7.
39. Margaret Connolly, “Mapping Manuscripts and Readers of Contemplations
of Dread and Love of God” in Design and Distribution of Late Medieval
Manuscripts in England, edited by Margaret Connolly and Linne Mooney
(York: York Medieval Press, 2008), 262.
40. Morey, Entre:330–332.
41. The Conscience manuscripts which attribute authorship to Richard Rolle
are BodL, MS Ashmole 60, BL, MS Egerton 3245, London, Lambeth
Palace, MS 260, Camb., Gonville and Caius College, MS 386, and Oxford,
Merton College, MS 68. These are discussed in Robert Lewis and Angus
McIntosh, A Descriptive Guide to the Manuscripts of the Prick of Conscience
(Oxford: Society for the Study of Mediaeval Languages and Literature,
1982).
42. Morey, 6: 436–482.
43. Mary Carruthers and Jan M. Ziolkowski, The Medieval Craft of Memory:
An Anthology of Texts and Pictures (Philadelphia, Pa: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 6.
44. Kimberly Rivers, “The Fear of Divine Vengeance: Mnemonic Images as a
Guide to Conscience in the Late Middle Ages” in Fear and its
Representations in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, edited by Anne Scott
and Cynthia Kosso (Turnhout: Brepols, 2002).
45. Rivers, 77–9. See also Roger A. Pack, “Artes memorativae in a Venetian
manuscript,” Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du moyen âge 50
(1983): 257–300.
46. J. F. Worthen, “Adam of Dryburgh and the Augustinian Tradition,” Revue
des Études Augustiniennes 43 (1997), 343–344.
47. The Latin reads: “Video haec, Domine Deus meus. Video haec, inquam,
et timeo. Considero haec et pavea. Cerno haec et in manibus tuis trepido,
O Deus juste et occulte: occulte et juste!” qtd in Worthen, 344.
48. Jacques Paul Migne, Patrologia Latina, vol. 153 (Paris: s.l., 1864)0.834–
35; translated and qtd in Rivers, 82.
49. Morey, 5: 845–860.
50. See Sue Powell, “The Fifteen Signs of Doom in Image and Text: the Pricke
of Conscience Window at All Saints, North Street, York” in Harlaxton
Medieval Studies XII (New Series) Proceedings of the 2000 Symposium:
Prophecy, Apocalypse and the Day of Doom, edited by Nigel J. Morgan
(Donington, Lincs: Shaun Tyas/Paul Watkins Publications, 2004),
292–316.
51. Ed S. Tan introduces the term in Emotion and the Structure of Narrative
Film: Film as an Emotion Machine (New York: Routledge, 2011).
52. Scholars such as Noël Carroll and John Clute among others have tradition-
ally placed the beginning of the horror genre in the eighteenth century,
finding its roots in Gothic novels such as Horace Walpole’s The Castle of
Otranto (1764) or “monster stories” including Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
(1818). For examples of this approach, see Carroll, The Philosophy Of
Horror, Or, Paradoxes of the Heart (New York: Routledge, 1990), 14 and
Clute, “The Darkening Garden” in Stay (Essex: Beccon Publications,
2014), 269–343.
53. Carroll, 56.
54. Joynes, xii.
56. Matt Hills, The Pleasures of Horror (London: Continuum, 2005), 3.
57. Robert C. Solomon, “Real Horror” in Dark Thoughts: Philosophic
Reflections on Cinematic Horror, edited by Steven Jay Schneider and
Daniel Shaw (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2003), 230–31.
58. Ibid., 251.
59. Jonathan Hughes, “The Administration of Confession in the Diocese of
York in the Fourteenth Century” in Studies in Clergy and Ministry in
Medieval England, edited by David M. Smith, Purvis Seminar Studies,
Borthwick Studies in History I (York: University of York Press, 1991), 112.
60. Lewis and McIntosh’s early estimate was about 1350 on the basis that
many of the manuscripts appear just after this date, but Hanna and Wood
more recently have placed the date some 20 years earlier in Ralph Hanna
III and Sarah Wood, eds., Richard Morris’s Prick of Conscience: A Corrected
and Amplified Reading Text (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), vii.
62. Carroll, 171.
63. Ibid., 35.
64. Ibid., 57.
65. For criticisms and revisions, see Berys Gaut, “The Paradox of Horror,” The
British Journal of Aesthetics 33 (1993): 333–45; Mark Verobej, “Monsters
and the Paradox of Horror,” Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review
XXXVI (1997): 219–46; Robert C. Solomon, “The Philosophy of Horror,
or, Why Did Godzilla Cross the Road?” in Entertaining Ideas – Popular
Philosophical Essays: 1970–1990 (New York, Prometheus Books), 119–30);
and Matt Hills, “An Event-Based Definition of Art-Horror” in Dark
Thoughts: Philosophic Reflections on Cinematic Horror, 138–157.
66. Robert Bartlett, The Natural and the Supernatural in the Middle Ages
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 2.
67. Morey, Entre: 175–180.
68. Hills, The Pleasures of Horror, 5.
69. Ibid., 28.
126 H. MARSHALL
70. Ibid.
71. Yvonne Leffler, Horror as Pleasure: The Aesthetics of Horror Fiction
(Stockholm, Almqvist & Wiksell International, 2000), 183–4.
72. Hills, The Pleasures of Horror, 31.
73. Morey, 6:432–443.
74. Hughes, “The Administration of Confession,” 112.
75. Pinedo, “Postmodern Elements of the Contemporary Horror Film” in The
Horror Film, edited by Stephen Prince (Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University
Press, 2004), 99.
CHAPTER 7
Lovecraft’s Debt to Dandyism
Vivian Ralickas
Lovecraft was by no means a Dandy, either in its Brummellian form cele-

brated during the Regency period or in its late Victorian, Decadent incar-
nation championed by Oscar Wilde.1 Readers familiar with his biography
and letters know that Lovecraft’s limited financial resources and particular
temperament would likely have hindered his ability to wear the crown of
vanity and hold court among the elite of his day, despite fashioning him-
self as a New England gentleman obsessed with all things British on the
basis of his ancestry. In taking Lovecraft’s biography as a starting point to
an analysis of his notion of ideal masculinity, I therefore aim, on the one
hand, to elaborate on another critical aspect of what I identified as the
abjection of self that undercuts any form of idealism in his fiction: the
“clean and proper” body2 of the gentleman writer.3 To be specific, the
strength of his affinity towards Dandyism as a specific mode of masculinity
extends beyond his personal aspirations to include his critical and aesthetic
perspectives, manifest in his fiction, correspondence, and literary essays,
particularly Supernatural Horror in Literature, wherein he reveals his fas-
cination with leading Dandy authors of the nineteenth century. Through
an examination of literary Dandyism’s ideological biases in the intimate
papers of Charles Baudelaire and the specific form of irony inherent in the
V. Ralickas (*)
English, Marianopolis College, Westmount, QC, Canada

128 V. RALICKAS
works known to Lovecraft by Théophile Gautier, Joris-Karl Huysmans,

Walter Pater, and Oscar Wilde, I endeavour, as my second objective, to
build on scholarship linking Lovecraft to the Decadents by uncovering
their influence on his deportment, political views, and fiction. In other
words, I hope to tease out the threads that weave the story of Lovecraft’s
debt to Dandyism.
Part 1: Lovecraft’s Personal Investment

in the Persona of the British Gentleman
From a biographical perspective, the origins of Lovecraft’s strategic appro-

priation of certain crucial aspects of British gentlemanliness pivotal to the
Dandy persona attest to his espousal of reactionary values at odds with the
influx of dynamic, new cultural influences that reshaped early twentieth-
century America. Moreover, such posturing speaks to his genuine and
emotionally driven aristocratic affectations, vital characteristics of his sense
of entitlement. Written and published for the most part in the decades fol-
lowing World War I, the 1920s and early 1930s, his work bears witness to
titanic changes in American culture. To be specific, Lovecraft’s generation
lived through two important phases of immigration, from 1891 to 1920
and, to a lesser extent, from 1920 to 1960.4 Unlike the first wave prior to
the 1890s, comprising chiefly of northern and western Europeans, among
the 18 million people who came to call the USA their home at the turn of
the century, most were of eastern and southern European extraction,
including Italians, Slavs (Gibson and Lennon 1999), and eastern European
Jews.5 The period whose onset roughly coincides with Lovecraft’s birth in
1890 was therefore pivotal in redesigning America’s cultural landscape. To
someone with Lovecraft’s perceptiveness and sensibility, the contrast
between the old world and the emerging one proves violent and unset-
tling. The letters that Lovecraft pens from 1924 to 1926 while living in
New York City offer a case in point: They present a detailed snapshot of
urban life from the perspective of an articulate, creative, albeit consider-
ably biased white Anglo-Saxon man displaced from the privilege and cul-
tural stability which he once enjoyed in his native New England, whose
impoverished means immerse him in the multi-ethnic reality of the mod-
ern American metropolis of the 1920s.
For one, Lovecraft’s demeanour in these letters reveals a strong under-
current of British influence in his aristocratic pose. In a letter penned in
1924, he refers to himself despite his young age (Lovecraft was in his early
LOVECRAFT’S DEBT TO DANDYISM 129
30s when he resided in New York City) as “grandpa Theobald,” known to

his inner circle for his characteristic “Theobaldian reserve, Theobaldian
conservatism, and Theobaldian adherence to the old order of things.”6
Lovecraft’s visit to the Morris-Jumel Mansion (built in 1765) in Manhattan
in 1922, during one of his many pilgrimages to the region’s eighteenth-
century architectural relics, offers compelling evidence that the “old
order” to which he subscribes is the colonial, pre-Revolution America
ruled by the British: He signs a visitors’ registry as “H: Lovecraft, Gent.,
Providence-Plantations, in Rd: Island” (LNY 23). It is noteworthy that in
the same letter to his aunt Lillian, he makes reference to having signed
“the register in the old Sawyer place in Merrimac last May,” an old colonial
house dating back to 1735, in the same manner (Lovecraft, LNY 23).
Aside from implicitly alluding to the bygone days of white privilege prior
to Abolition in one of the leading slave-trading states, Lovecraft’s signa-
ture in both cases also reveals his Loyalist bias in emphasizing the archaic
and official name of the state, Rhode Island and Providence Plantations.7
His fantasy regarding the former estate further corroborates his sympa-
thetic attitude towards British rule: “One of the old spires remains, and I
permitted my fancy to restore the original scene as it must have been in
1740 or 1750, before ever the Colonies thought of treason & rebellion
against His Majesty’s Government” (Lovecraft, LNY 23). Such a state-
ment will come as no surprise to readers familiar with Lovecraft’s enduring
adulation of British culture. When, at the age of six, his maternal grandfa-
ther informs him of the American Revolution, Lovecraft recalls how he
“shocked everyone by adopting a dissenting view […] Her Majesty,
Victoria, Queen of Great Britain & Ireland & Empress of India com-
manded my allegiance. ‘God Save the Queen’ was a stock phrase of mine.”8
Aside from amounting to Lovecraft’s lament for the passing of what he
holds to have been the halcyon days of Anglo-Saxon cultural dominance
in America, his reactionary pose also attests to an entrenched affinity for a
specific mode of British-centred masculinity.
The British flavour of Lovecraft’s conservative, gentlemanly preten-
sions and elitist bias can be attributed to his family history’s compelling
influence on his ideal sense of self. On the one hand, the idea that Lovecraft
forms at an early age of his father as a proper Englishman had a pivotal
influence in shaping his notion of manhood. Although Winfield Scott
Lovecraft only lived with his son for close to three years after his birth
before being interned for what some suspect to have been symptoms of
tertiary syphilis, and Howard claims to have retained only a “vague image”
130 V. RALICKAS
of the man (Joshi, IAP 1.21, 1.22), in a letter dated 1931, Lovecraft
remembers how his
father was constantly warned [by his family] not to fall into Americanisms of
speech and provincial vulgarities of dress and mannerisms—so much so that
he was generally regarded as an Englishman despite his birth in Rochester,
N.Y. I can just recall his extremely precise and cultivated British voice.9
Lovecraft’s observations have been corroborated by family acquaintances

who appear to have been far less fond of Winfield Scott’s English affecta-
tions (Joshi, IAP 1.27). As Joshi astutely observes, “we need look no
further for the source of Lovecraft’s own Anglophilia” (IAP 1.27), as it
finds its grounding in his boyhood memories of his father. On the other
hand, it is to his maternal line that Lovecraft owes his strongest claim to
privilege. Contrary to the Lovecrafts, whose genealogical records are
spotty at best, the Phillipses conclusively descend from a number of old
New England lines dating back to the seventeenth century (Joshi, IAP
1.5). Moreover, his maternal grandfather, Whipple Van Buren Phillips,
was a prominent industrialist noted for his cultivation and extensive travels
throughout Europe (Joshi, IAP 1.7). On account of what he claimed to
know about his matrilineal and patrilineal origins, however erroneous at
times, especially concerning the latter (Joshi, IAP 1.3), Lovecraft thus
fancied himself to be of “unmixed English gentry” (Joshi, IAP 1.13).
In other words, gestures such as drawing the Phillips’ coat of arms in a
letter to his aunt Lillian in 1924 (LNY 95) or mentioning the lineage of
his friends when they appear to be of noble extraction emphasize
Lovecraft’s personal sense of superiority as a result of the importance that
he attributes to his own ancestry. In speaking of his friend Alfred Galpin
and his wife in 1925, for example, Lovecraft makes a point of informing
Aunt Lillian that “she is descended from the most ancient Norman nobil-
ity domiciled in England—the de Roches—& Alfredus is strongly think-
ing of changing his name to hers, because of its greater aristocratic
significance” (LNY 176). What follows spells out Lovecraft’s approval of
his friend’s aspirational ideals: “A proper family reception of Grandpa’s
Boy—I can see him as Alfred de Roche, in a panelled coach with his new
coat-of-arms on the door!” (LNY 176). Elsewhere Lovecraft’s praise of
Wilfred B. Talman, a student at Brown University who attended one of his
literary soirées, reveals his bias in favour of those with the right genealogi-
cal pedigree: “tall, lean, light, & aristocratically clean-cut […] He is
descended from the most ancient Dutch families of lower New York state”
(LNY 186). Informed by an inflated sense of his own paternal genealogy
and an awareness of the Phillipses’ direct connection to distinguished New
England lines, Lovecraft’s emphasis on his friends’ ancestry suggests that
for him, it is not enough simply to be a Yankee, culturally speaking; ideally,
one ought to descend from the bloodlines of New England’s ancient
Dutch and Anglo-Saxon settlers. Lovecraft’s gentlemanly affectations are
thus rooted in both his father’s formative influence on his ideal notion of
masculinity as decidedly English in essence and in the importance that he
attributes to his family history and its Teutonic heritage.
Lovecraft’s personal connection to, and veneration of, the British-ruled
New England of old nonetheless offers merely a partial justification for the
elitism that defines his notion of ideal masculinity. It is his sempiternal
mourning the loss of his childhood home on 454 Angell Street in
Providence, Rhode Island, on account of impoverished family circum-
stances in 1904—when he was only 13 years old—that betrays another
vital aspect of the emotional origins of his claims to privilege.
Notwithstanding the series of personal traumas that likely contributed to
transforming his home’s atmosphere into a hothouse at times, including
the stress of his father’s prolonged illness, the true cause of which remained
shrouded in secrecy for Lovecraft (Joshi, IAP 1.25); his uneasy relation-
ship with his mother, a woman characterized by her overprotectiveness,
excessive indulgence, and a love-hate attitude towards her son,10 and who
was later admitted to a mental asylum in 1919 for long-standing physical
and psychological issues (Joshi, IAP 1.24); not to mention Howard’s own
nervous condition, no doubt precipitated or at the very least exacerbated
by his mother’s ill health, which contributed to both his spotty attendance
and inability to complete high school (Joshi, IAP 1.130–31, 1.302); for
the most part, the period of Lovecraft’s youth spent at 454 Angell Street
seems to have been characterized by the joy of intellectual discovery,
including forays into literary and scientific writing. As the only child in his
household, Lovecraft grew up surrounded by adults, namely, his mother,
her two sisters, and his maternal grandparents, who indulged his every
whim. For instance, when precocious young Howard professed an interest
in chemistry in 1898, he “was given a cellar room of good size, & provided
with some simple apparatus” (Joshi, IAP 1.58). Later, when his attention
turned to astronomy, his family obliged him with several telescopes, the
last of which, in 1904, was priced at $50.00 (Joshi, IAP 1.81). As Joshi
notes, this is significant given that the Phillipses saw fit to purchase
132 V. RALICKAS
such an expensive piece of equipment for the boy after their fortunes took
a turn for the worse following Whipple Phillips’ death (Joshi, IAP 1.81).
The “big, rambling, three-story clapboard home with fifteen rooms”
which housed four servants on the third floor, and contained a library
comprising 2000 books, “some of them centuries old” (de Camp 1996,
1), was more than simply a luxurious residence wherein he enjoyed the
material comforts common to the New England gentry. More importantly,
it afforded him the kind of personal freedom and family support necessary
to the unrestrained flourishing of his intellect. Thus, the loss of his family
estate symbolizes far more than a decline in his class status; it represents
the end of a pivotal era in his life that he would come to idealize as an adult
as a lost paradise.
Not surprisingly, the burden of exile haunted him throughout his life.
In helping his friend George Kirk to collect books from the “disintegrat-
ing private home” of a recently deceased gentleman scholar in New York,
Lovecraft cannot help but draw a parallel with the collapse of his own
ancestral homestead: “I could see the fall of 454 all over again, and echoed
the pangs which are still fresh after twenty-one years” (LNY 123). His
emotional ties to his childhood home ran so deep that as late as 1934,
three years before his death, he confesses to Alfred Galpin that “my keen-
est envy is of the man who can die in the house he was born in.”11 In light
of Lovecraft’s privileged youth and subsequent decline in class status, a
confluence of nostalgia for a lost utopia and defensiveness as a result of his
fall from grace courses through his aristocratic yearnings and identification
as a New England gentleman of British extraction and allegiance.
Significantly, this pattern of transforming a quest for the ideal into a defen-
sive strategy to safeguard one’s identity emerges often in writers who wear
the mask of Dandyism as a shield, a point to which I will return.
Before examining the intellectual context of Lovecraft’s connection to
Dandyism as a cultural movement through his exposure to the works of
some its most influential writers, evident in his letters and in his essay
Supernatural Horror in Literature, one final biographical aspect merits
attention for its suggestive link to Dandy lore: Lovecraft’s protective
punctiliousness in manner of dress and his adherence to the normative
conventions of heterosexual, Anglo-Saxon masculinity. Sensitized to
English sartorial finery at an early age on account of his father, Lovecraft
recalls, in a letter dated 1916, how smitten he was with what he perceived
to be Winfield Scott’s gentlemanly attire:
I can just remember my father—an immaculate figure in black coat & vest
& grey striped trousers. I had a childish habit of slapping him on the knee
and shouting ‘Papa, you look just like a young man!’ I don’t know where I
picked that phrase up, but I was vain & self-conscious […]. (Joshi, IAP
1.28)
Anecdotally, in his 20s Lovecraft was known to have worn his father’s
sophisticated, albeit dated, vestments until they became threadbare, affect-
ing what Sprague de Camp qualifies as an “aggressively old-fashioned
appearance” (de Camp 1996, 69). Although he eventually outgrew this
pretension, his tastes nonetheless remained conservative. Lovecraft’s
choice of words to describe his father’s clothes and his own state of mind
in admiring them is telling: “Immaculate” and “self-conscious” are two
adjectives that continued to characterize Lovecraft’s careful manner of
dress as an adult. He reports in one of his last letters to Aunt Lillian from
New York in 1926: “since reacting against New York’s squalor I have
adopted a somewhat higher standard of neatness—not only as concerns
shoes, but as concerns hair cutting & clothes as well” (Lovecraft, LNY
294). Ever the traditionalist in all matters including personal style,
Lovecraft could not risk being mistaken for the “rabble” that trumpets its
lowly class status in its preference for “conspicuous and feminine” clothes
(LNY 233). His association of the feminine with those whom he deems to
be inferior and therefore unmanly is suggestive. Perhaps his ideas on mas-
culinity reflect a resistance to his mother’s feminization of him in early
childhood. Allegedly, Susie Lovecraft had wanted a girl; in addition to
creating a hope chest for her son, as was the custom for daughters, she
kept him in frocks and long curls until he was likely six or seven—that is,
until the boy protested, according to claims made by Sonia H. Greene,
Lovecraft’s wife, and had his locks cut to a boyish crop (Joshi, IAP 1.65).
Lovecraft’s espousal of distinctly sober and conventionally masculine attire
could therefore be attributed to more than merely his desire to cut a pol-
ished figure against the backdrop of the ethnic masses; perhaps it betrays a
deep-rooted need to assert his gender identity as a man.
Likewise, despite Joshi’s claim to the contrary, Lovecraft’s “quick and
unwavering prejudice against homosexuals” (Joshi, IAP 1.66) could
therefore amount to a defensive strategy hiding his own gender and sexual
anxieties. His homophobia finds its full expression in his ruthless attack of
Oscar Wilde, whose elegant manner he acknowledges by means of the
favourable epithet “the Prince of Dandies”:
134 V. RALICKAS
His character, notwithstanding a daintiness of manners which imposed an

exterior shell of decorative decency & decorum, was thoroughly rotten &
contemptible […]. So thorough was his absence of that form of taste which
we call a moral sense, that he who succeeded for a time in being the Prince
of Dandies was never in any basic sense what one likes to call a gentleman
[…] it is hard to feel much charity or affection toward the bloated, dissi-
pated, & diseased old high-liver who virtually rotted to pieces & exploded
in ‘Valdemar’ fashion on that grey winter day of 1900.12
Tempered by his praise of Wilde’s literary merits in the closing sentences

of the same letter, both Lovecraft’s lurid description of the exiled Wilde
following his trial for homosexuality and his exclusion of the Dandy from
the gentlemanly class place Wilde in the same abject category as Lovecraft’s
fictional monsters and non-Teutonic, effeminate immigrants. In other
words, on account of his perceived deviant sexuality, the poet and play-
wright becomes a form of corruption. Put another way, if we follow the
Lacanian logic of the superego that informs Kristeva’s notion of abjection,
in which our internalization of symbolic law is coeval with our desire to
transgress it, homophobia such as Lovecraft’s suggests that the “the pro-
hibition that maintains and regulates the social order,” evident in
Lovecraft’s definition of what a gentleman is not, “draws its strength from
that which it excludes”13: homosexuality. Without a doubt a complex
emotional web sustains Lovecraft’s identity as a man. Its form, however,
subscribes to specific conventions predating him by close to a century,
which unequivocally idealize a homosocial, albeit outwardly heterosexual,
culturally English, and inherently elitist type of masculinity. During the
Regency period in Britain, it came to be known as Dandyism.
Part 2: Lovecraft’s Connection to Brummellian

Dandyism
The sober, aristocratic elegance that epitomizes the Regency Dandy in the
figure of George Bryan Brummell casts a long shadow over Lovecraft’s
masculine ideal. For one enamoured with the Georgian period from social
and architectural standpoints, and who claimed in his 20s to favour a crew
cut hairstyle in imitation of eighteenth-century gentlemen who wore their
hair in this manner under their wigs (de Camp 1996, 69), the foppish
costumes of the eighteenth century, worn by the beaus who predate
Brummell’s ascendancy over the elite social circles of English nobility,
were nonetheless anathema to Lovecraft’s conservative style of dress. In a

statement that echoes one of the central doctrines of Regency Dandyism,
Lovecraft explains the logic underlying his comparatively restrained sarto-
rial decisions: “A gentleman should be always attired in good taste, but he
should never be actively conscious of his clothes. They should be to him
integral outgrowths of his personality & aesthetick [sic] sense; matters of
course, & never artificial bedizenments to be flaunted” (LNY 238). The
nonchalance to which Lovecraft aspired was a commonplace tenet of aris-
tocratic, British masculinity of the late Georgian period incarnated in the
figure of George Bryan Brummell, the quintessential Regency Dandy who
revolutionized men’s fashion.
A survey of nineteenth-century French and British responses to
Brummell’s distinctive style reveals both its characteristic restraint and the
scope of its influence on men’s dress over the span of a century. In his
semi-biographical tribute to his hero, Jules-Amédée Barbey d’Aurevilly,
French Dandy and unfailing advocate of Brummell whose fiction Lovecraft
had read,14 observes, in a passage that parallels Lovecraft’s own ideas on
proper gentlemanly attire, that Brummell “remained impeccably groomed,
but he subdued the colours of his clothes, simplified their cut, and wore
them without thinking about it,” since, as he explains in the footnote to
this passage, “A Dandy can spend ten hours dressing, but once it is done,
he will put it out of his mind. It is for others to notice how well-dressed he
is.”15 The strength of Brummell’s authority in the shaping of refined mas-
culinity from the turn of the nineteenth century onwards cannot be over-
stated. According to Ian Kelly, Brummell’s most recent biographer:
He was at the centre of what fashion historians have termed ‘The Great
Masculine Renunciation’ when men turned their backs on highly decorative
dress and took to nuances of cut, fit, and proportion—in keeping with a
revolutionary and neo-classical age, to express status, strength and
sensitivity.16
The impact and subtlety of Brummell’s style, its defiance of the powder
and periwigs of old, were not lost on his contemporaries. When remark-
ing on the great men of his age, the notorious Lord Byron, responsible
for endowing the Dandy with “an intellectual authority from the begin-
ning,”17 holds Brummell in higher esteem than both himself and Napoleon
(Kelly 2005, 211). Captain William Jesse, an early biographer of the Beau
who met him during his exile in France and whose two volumes of
136 V. RALICKAS
anecdotes had a significant impact on the dissemination of the myth of

Brummell as the ultimate Dandy, notes that “his chief aim was to avoid
anything marked; one of his aphorisms being, that the severest mortifica-
tion a gentleman could incur was, to attract observation in the street by
his outward appearance.”18 As a result, Brummell “exercised the most
correct taste in the selection of each article of apparel, of a form and
colour harmonious with all the rest, for the purpose of producing a per-
fectly elegant general effect” (Jesse 1886, 56). Likewise, as late as 1896,
the Dandy, critic, and caricaturist Max Beerbohm praises Brummell in his
essay “Dandies and Dandies.” In tracing a selective critical history of
Dandyism from its incarnation during the Regency period in the person
of Brummell to the fin-de-siècle, Decadent Dandy, Beerbohm sidesteps
the Beau’s wit and impertinence, two characteristics of paramount signifi-
cance to early critics, choosing instead to focus his praise on “the utter
simplicity of his attire.”19 Beerbohm identifies Brummell’s “fine scorn of
accessories” as the origin of modern Dandyism, for its “production of the
supreme effect through means the least extravagant” (Beerbohm 1896,
4). In other words, the late nineteenth century applauded, through the
figure of Brummell, a form of sartorial sobriety analogous to that espoused
by Lovecraft in the 1920s. For Lovecraft, a representative of the Anglo-
Saxon, American upper class whose taste was informed by his love of all
things British from an early age, the close parallel manifest in Jesse’s and
Barbey’s descriptions of Brummell’s preferences in dress and decorum
and Lovecraft’s own pronouncements on these subjects therefore traces
not only the lasting influence of the Regency Dandy’s innovative style but
also Lovecraft’s personal connection to a long-established form of elitist
masculinity.
Fundamentally, to the writers and artists who became enamoured with
Dandyism, the Dandy’s polished performance stands for something
beyond mere surface appearance: to them, his graceful deportment and
impeccable taste function as indexes of his intrinsic superiority. French
poet and herald of Decadence Charles Baudelaire, whose perverse sensibil-
ity, despite its lack of a cosmic perspective, Lovecraft praises in referring to
him as a “titan” and an “illustrious poet”20 in Supernatural Horror in
Literature, conveys a sentiment similar to that expressed by Captain Jesse
and Barbey in his philosophical definition of the Dandy. Baudelaire’s
stance is a testament to the enduring trend of understated, masculine ele-
gance spurred by Brummell:
Dandyism does not even consist, as many thoughtless people seem to

believe, in an immoderate taste for the toilet and material elegance. For the
perfect dandy these things are no more than symbols of his aristocratic supe-
riority of mind. Furthermore to his eyes, which are in love with distinction
above all things, the perfection of his toilet will consist in absolute simplic-
ity.21 (My emphasis)
No doubt Lovecraft would agree with Baudelaire that a tastefully conser-

vative ensemble conveys the wearer’s innate superiority, if he contends
that the direct opposite is true:
It amuses me to see how some of these flashy young “boobs” & foreigners
spend their fortunes on various kinds of expensive clothes which they regard
as evidences of meritorious taste, but which in reality are their absolute
social and aesthetick [sic] damnation—being little short of placards shriek-
ing in bold letters: “I am an ignorant peasant,” “I am a mongrel gutter-rat,”
or “I am a tasteless & unsophisticated yokel.” (LNY 233)
To press the point further, Lovecraft indulges in a touch of Dandiacal van-

ity when fussing over the loss of the suits stolen from his dressing alcove
(LNY 127) or when boasting of his good taste to Aunt Lillian. Caprice
and sentimentality aside, Lovecraft’s chief concern, in his hyperbolic
lament to his aunt over the loss of his clothes, centres on his notion of the
minimum sartorial accoutrements needed to maintain a baseline of gentle-
manly propriety: “Just as I had decided to try to look more respectable by
keeping my clothes in good order, here comes this blasted, infernal thun-
derbolt to deprive me of the battery of four suits and one really decent
overcoat needed as a minimum of neat appearance” (LNY 128–29).
Likewise, his rapturous, detailed, and lengthy account of his successful
quest to find affordable yet refined replacement suits—spanning several
letters—further underscores Lovecraft’s ardent need to uphold an image
of gentility, not to mention his pride in his self-professed, discerning
taste.22 In boasting of the “radiantly aristocratic ensemble” that he man-
aged to find at a bargain price, he states that it “further confirms my origi-
nal belief in my own taste where clothing is concerned,” as he had
“developed an eye for the difference between the clothing a gentleman
wears & that which a gentleman doesn’t” (Lovecraft, LNY 232).
Significantly, the basis of his enjoyment of “good clothes—of the quiet &
rich variety” rests not simply on the fashioning of a polished exterior but
138 V. RALICKAS
on the fact that such enjoyment constitutes “a form of aesthetic pleasure

which I should indulge to the full if possessed of the proper resources”
(Lovecraft, LNY 222). This sentiment situates Lovecraft among a select
coterie, the financially disadvantaged poet-Dandies of the nineteenth
century, aristocrats and bohemians alike, who needed to earn a living,
often from their writing, to sustain their Dandiacal practices. Notably, the
list includes Lord Byron, whose idiosyncratic interpretation of Brummellian
elegance, arising from his successful fusing of two personas, the artist and
the Dandy, pervades the form of Dandyism adopted by French artists and
writers of the era.23 Likewise, Barbey, Balzac, Stendhal, Gautier, and
Baudelaire, to name only a few of Lovecraft’s French predecessors, all
express a similar yearning for the means to live up to the Dandy’s aspira-
tional lifestyle and an unflinching conviction in the aesthetic value of sar-
torial splendour—a value that transcends the merely bourgeois obsession
with surface appearances and attains a spiritual dimension on the fringes of
asceticism, particularly in the works of Barbey and Baudelaire. In keeping
with the Brummellian notion of Dandyism perpetuated over the course of
the nineteenth century, Lovecraft’s definition of masculine elegance thus
runs deeper than the superficial consideration of his outward appearance
to include an aesthetic sensibility whose symbolic function is to convey his
innate superiority.
Anecdotally, the notion of self-restraint central to the mode of mascu-
line elegance promoted by Brummell parallels some of Lovecraft’s own
personal habits and idiosyncrasies. For instance, the strict diet that
Lovecraft adopts in view of “reducing” to what he deems to be a more
appropriate weight during his residence in New York City, an activity
whose results he describes as the “reclamation of a decade-lost statue
from the vile mud which had so long encrusted it!” (LNY 145), can be
interpreted as an attempt to live up to an aesthetic ideal of masculinity.
Notably, during his youth he perceived leanness as aristocratic, and
“though that his brain worked better when it was slightly starved” (de
Camp 1996, 71). Historically, the idealization of thinness was common
among the British elite. Lord Byron was known for adhering to a strict
diet and eventually binging when famished, since he believed that he
would lose his creative prowess if he got too fat.24 Likewise, Brummell,
who was noted in his youth for his Apollonian figure (Jesse 1886, 48),
“weighed himself at the shop more than forty times between 1822 and
1825” in an attempt to control his weight gain in adult life (Foxcroft
2011, 74). Lovecraft’s quest to maintain an ideal weight, a seemingly
trivial biographical detail, therefore inscribes itself within the narrative of

idealized masculinity essential to the Dandy’s pose.
The Dandy’s necessary continence of his carnal appetites is another
facet of Brummell’s legacy that is akin to Lovecraft’s own attitudes towards
love and sex. The myth of Brummell, especially as it spread to the conti-
nent, minimized or outright denied the Beau’s amorous exploits during
an age notorious to its Victorian successors for its licentiousness (Kelly
2005, 94), transforming him into a reflexive figure whose cultivation of
vanity paradoxically made him entirely self-sufficient. As Jesse puts it, “he
had too much self-love ever to be really in love” (Jesse 1886, 119). In
defining the Dandy in 1863, Baudelaire reiterates this sentiment: “It is a
kind of cult of the self which can nevertheless survive the pursuit of a hap-
piness to be found in someone else—in woman, for example” (“The
Painter of Modern Life” 27). In the hands of Jesse and the French writers
who inherited Brummell’s legacy, the Beau expressed a pure, self-contained
masculinity unsullied by the world. In the eloquent, paradoxical words of
Barbey d’Aurevilly, “he had that rare and charming familiarity that touches
everything and profanes nothing” (Barbey 1845, 82). For a man who
professed losing interest in sex at a the age of eight for its mechanistic,
“purely animal nature & separation from such things as intellect &
beauty”25; who never made a romantic declaration about his wife, but
spoke instead of affinities in intellect and temperament in letters announc-
ing his marriage to his aunts (LNY 34–45); and who considered emotion
to be “a distinctly inferior form of psychic activity,”26 Lovecraft, whose
taste in dress and etiquette resonate with those of the quintessential
Dandy, would no doubt find the asexual dimension of the legend of
Brummell congenial. From a biographical standpoint, in other words,
Lovecraft was emotionally invested in a long-established and enduring
mode of elitist masculinity that flourished in Britain at the turn of the
nineteenth century under the aegis of the most famous Dandy, Beau
Brummell.
Part 3: Lovecraft’s Insight into Literary Dandyism

If family history, idiosyncrasies of taste and temperament, and the social
pressures prevalent in New England during Lovecraft’s formative years
converge to give form to his personal sense of a decidedly Brummellian
notion of gentlemanly propriety, certain aspects of Lovecraft’s work, par-
ticularly his political views and the type of irony implicit in key stories,
140 V. RALICKAS
draw their strength from his critical insight into the literary dimension of
Dandyism. Thus, Lovecraft’s familiarity with leading nineteenth-century
Dandy authors, evident in the references that he makes to their works in
his fiction, correspondence, and essays, particularly Supernatural Horror
in Literature, not only further establishes his knowledge of Dandyism as
an exclusive mode of masculinity of Anglo-Saxon extraction but, more
importantly, it reveals his awareness of two key characteristics of the Dandy
whose influence is manifest in his writing: The intellectual elitism that
distinguishes literary Dandyism and the impertinence that sets the Dandy
apart from the rabble. Before considering Lovecraft’s entanglement with
the literary side of Dandyism, however, the thematic link evident between
the Dandiacal works with which Lovecraft was familiar and the horror fic-
tion that he penned merits examination.
In Supernatural Horror in Literature, Lovecraft’s historical survey of
the literary canon responsible for giving rise to the modern weird tale
includes praise for Baudelaire, Gautier, Huysmans, and Wilde. While he
makes no reference to Walter Pater, he claims to have read his novel
Marius the Epicurean (1885) “many years” prior to 1928 (ES 146), and
elsewhere confesses, in a letter to August Derleth dated May 1928 in
which he mentions Marius, to having been “greatly impressed with
[Marius’] importance as a study in philosophy & aesthetics” (Lovecraft,
ES 146). It is worthy of note that the Dandy protagonists whom Lovecraft
encounters in the works in question (excepting Baudelaire’s, to whose
writing I will return shortly) take their cue from Brummell’s biography,
which offers a blueprint for the tragic parabola that characterizes the life
of a Dandy. Although lacking in the cosmic magnitude essential to
Lovecraft, who contends that the chief criterion responsible for the success
of a weird tale rests in its ability to create “a certain atmosphere of breath-
less and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces” (CE 2.84), the
fate of the arbiter of taste of Regency England, a man who banked every-
thing on his immaculate public image, refinement, and wit, and whose
popularity among the fashionable elite rivalled that of his patron, the
Prince Regent, amounts to a horror unparalleled on a human scale. Exiled
in France, Brummell died a pauper in an asylum, plagued by dementia and
a host of other debilitating ailments brought on by tertiary syphilis.27
Thus, the Dandy’s stone-cold mask of impassibility, his ability to astonish
without ever losing face, crumbles to reveal the vulnerable human being
within.
The fate of Dandies in several fictional works familiar to Lovecraft elabo-

rates on this dominant leitmotif in the myth of the Dandy. The eponymous
narrator of Walter Pater’s Marius the Epicurean, for instance, echoes
Brummell’s ironic, anticlimactic decline. Marius, a gentleman farmer of
reduced means as a result of the lavish spending of a Dandy uncle, dies a
faithless Christian martyr—a biting existential twist Lovecraft would no
doubt have appreciated. Although humorous in tone, Théophile Gautier’s
fantastic tale “The Mummy’s Foot” presents a Dandy whose ironic gesture,
his purchasing of an ancient Egyptian princess’ mummified foot as a paper-
weight for a trifle, uncovers the insignificance of his social status. In Joris-
Karl Huysmans’ Against Nature (À rebours), moreover, Lovecraft encounters
the reclusive and morally bankrupt fin-de-siècle Dandy Des Esseintes, whose
Decadent project to live a life of artifice fails as nature reclaims its dominion
over him in the form of his diseased body. Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of
Dorian Gray runs a parallel course, as the rakish aristocrat Dorian is destroyed
by his own grotesque narcissism. In other words, the fictional Dandy’s tragic
failure, either to live up to his own rigid code of conduct or to maintain his
social position, offers a dreadful narrative resolution for a figure whose
whole mode of being rests on his self-mastery and pre-eminence. More
importantly, the Dandy’s fate—madness, exile, or death as a result of his
adherence to a cultural model that is unsustainable—echoes that of many of
Lovecraft’s protagonists, whose beliefs and values, the core that sustains
their identities, prove meaningless in an anti-humanist cosmos.
Aside from the thematic appeal of the aforementioned Dandiacal texts,
in which the veil preserving the subject’s illusion of integrity is torn asun-
der, exposing him to the cruel “assaults of chaos” (Lovecraft, CE 2.84),
albeit of on a purely human level, literary Dandyism offers another point
of convergence with Lovecraft’s sensibility. In undercutting the impor-
tance of the Dandy’s physical presence, his manner of dress and deport-
ment, luminaries of French Dandyism such as Baudelaire and his
predecessor, Barbey, whose work Du Dandyisme et de George Brummell
had a significant impact on Baudelaire’s elevation of Dandyism to a spiri-
tual vocation, take their cue from Byron, locating the Dandy’s claim to
privilege in his superior intellect and creative genius. Although it seems
that Lovecraft was unfamiliar with Baudelaire’s 1863 essay “The Painter of
Modern Life” in which he systematically expounds his ideas on Dandyism,
the 1919 Modern Library edition of Baudelaire’s poetic works that
Lovecraft read in the mid-1920s includes translated excerpts of the poet’s
142 V. RALICKAS
intimate journals, originally published posthumously in 1887.28 Many

fragments make elliptical references to Dandyism, particularly to his aris-
tocratic superiority. To be specific, Baudelaire claims that “the human
imagination can conceive, without too much trouble, republics or other
community states, worthy of some glory, if directed by consecrated men,
by definite aristocrats.”29 This sanctified elite comprises none other than
Dandy-poets, on account of the “eternal superiority of the dandy”
(Baudelaire, “Intimate Papers” 229). To press the matter further,
Baudelaire affirms that “there exist but three respectable beings: The
priest, the warrior, the poet. To know, to kill, and to create. Other men are
serfs or slaves, created for the stable, that is, to exercise what are called
professions” (“Intimate Papers” 231). The denigration of professions in
this case constitutes a direct assault on the bourgeoisie for its materialism
and utilitarian values, since he contends, in anticipation of the art-for-
art’s-sake dogma adopted by the fin-de-siècle Decadents, that “to be a
useful man has always seemed to me a hideous thing” (Baudelaire,
“Intimate Papers” 227). As a result, Baudelaire’s assertions regarding the
Dandy-artist proclaim his innate superiority and natural right to rule.
Similarly, Lovecraft’s defence of a cultural aristocracy as a viable political
system in 1929 highlights the ideological affinities that he shares with
Baudelaire: “I venerate the principle of aristocracy without being especially
interested in aristocratic persons. I don’t care who has dominance, so long
as that dominance remains a certain kind of dominance, intellectually and
aesthetically considered.”30 Earlier, in 1922, Lovecraft defines his criteria
for admission to this ruling caste in terms of a “natural nobility which is
content with a recognition of its own worth and which demonstrates its
superiority in superior works and behaviour” (CE 5.71). In other words,
one can neither earn nor purchase membership into his ruling caste since
the requisite qualities are “natural,” that is to say, inherent, echoing the
Romantic notion of genius—and idea in line with intellectual Dandyism.
Contrary to Baudelaire, however, Lovecraft’s elite must belong to a spe-
cific ethnic group. For a man who considered himself to be an “Englishman
of taste” (LNY 255) and who held that “‘Americanism’ is expanded
Anglo-Saxonism” (CE 5.33), the “natural nobility” that governs the intel-
lectual and aesthetic affinities necessarily shared by Lovecraft’s new aristoc-
racy aligns with traditional Anglo-Saxon values, whose importance to his
emotional welfare was paramount. Specifically, in defining tradition as “the
potent emotional legacy bequeathed to us by the massed experience of our
ancestors, individual or national [,] biological or cultural” (SL2 357),
Lovecraft communicates a rigid commitment to upholding the values of

his forbears, regardless of their fitness in the current age, because to him,
it is the “one anchor of fixity which we can seize upon as the working
pseudo-standard of ‘values’ which we need in order to feel settled & con-
tented” (SL2 357). As Joshi puts it, his position amounts to a form of ethi-
cal fascism, for Lovecraft deigns to impose upon everyone, including those
who may not share his cultural heritage, the values that he personally holds
dear to heart.31 Race prejudice notwithstanding, Lovecraft’s favouring of
an aristocratic dictatorship as a system of governance aligns with the politi-
cal views of Baudelaire, harbinger of Decadence and leading proponent of
intellectual Dandyism.
Lovecraft’s encounter with the Dandy figure’s superiority on the basis
of his refined taste is not exclusive to Baudelaire’s musings. Consumed
with spleen against humanity, the Decadent Dandy protagonist of
Huysmans’ novel Against Nature, the dissolute only child of inbred
French nobility, ensconces himself in an estate away from Paris to live a
solitary life. In addition to affirming that Against Nature stands as a “sum-
mation and finale” of the type of psychological horror centring on “abnor-
malities of human thought” (CE 2.99), Lovecraft also mentions Huysmans
by name in “The Hound” (1922) and endows his characters with a blasé,
thrill-seeking attitude akin to the novel’s protagonist, suggesting that he
was already familiar with the novel prior to obtaining an English copy of it
in 1932.32 Notably, the first American edition of À rebours, translated by
John Howard, appears in 1922 with the title Against the Grain.33 While
the flamboyant, immoral, and antisocial Dandyism embodied by
Huysmans’ protagonist marks a radical departure from Brummell’s sober,
decorous, and socially extroverted performance, the impertinent religious
metaphor, a commonplace in Dandy discourse since Baudelaire and
Carlyle,34 underscores the inviolability of the Dandy’s autocratic stance.
Notably, Des Esseintes “preached” to his tradesmen “a sermon on dandy-
ism” at the height of his folly in Paris, “adjuring his bootmakers and tailors
to conform strictly to his encyclicals on matters of cut, and threatening
them with pecuniary excommunication if they did not follow to the letter
the instructions contained in his monitories and bulls”35 (my emphases).
Thus, the inherent logic of Dandyism in Against Nature still holds true to
its Regency origins, reaffirming the reasoning that informs Lovecraft’s
own sense of gentlemanly propriety and elitist tendencies: to proclaim
one’s ascendancy over the common man. (Only Des Esseintes’ elitism is so
144 V. RALICKAS
exclusive that his coterie includes only himself, taking Baudelaire’s idea of
an aristocracy of taste, a notion shared by Lovecraft, to an absurd extreme.)
Furthermore, Lovecraft’s disavowal of didacticism in literature, his fre-
quent proclamations that the artist’s creative genius ought to be given free
reins to choose his subject matter regardless of society’s moral proscrip-
tions, summarized in his essay “Ars Gratia Artis,” finds its correlative in
one of the attributes of the Dandy’s performance highlighted in literary
Dandyism: his impertinence. Bequeathed to us in the form of anecdotes
detailing his witty statements and demeanour, the Dandy’s impertinence
expresses a specific form of irony. Rather than operating on the contrast
between the literal and implied meanings of a given utterance, according
to Sima Godfrey, the Dandy’s remarks present echoes of social clichés that,
taken out of their pertinent context, become superfluous; as a result, the
original context itself becomes “the target of the subtlest of mockeries.”36
More specifically, the logic underpinning the Dandy’s ability to produce
the unexpected touted by his advocates rests on “the polemic between the
useful and the beautiful, the necessary and the superfluous” underscored
by his utterances and gestures (Godfrey 1982, 30). Thus, regarding the
oft-cited anecdote in which an injured Brummell regrets the use of his
favourite leg, Godfrey affirms that:
It is quite feasible […] for a man to regret an accident to his better or best
leg, because the notion of one leg being better than another inscribes itself
within a system of value oriented towards function […] But to have a favou-
rite leg is to bring to the anatomy of one’s body criteria of taste or aesthetic
appreciation and implicitly to mock the more banal concern for utility.
(Godfrey 1982, 30)
Without exception, the Dandy texts that Lovecraft esteems all operate on
an analogous type of reasoning, which pins aesthetic value against some
form of normative (and thereby useful) social convention.
The works that Lovecraft names in Supernatural Horror in Literature
by Théophile Gautier, whom Lovecraft considers an “exquisite stylist”
(CE 2.189), offer a case in point. To cite a brief but nonetheless fitting
example, in “The Mummy’s Foot,” a short story that conflates the iden-
tity of the Dandy with that of the antiquarian, the former’s vanity high-
lights the irony of using a mummy’s foot as a paperweight:
I looked upon all who did not possess, like myself, a paper-weight so authen-
tically Egyptian as very ridiculous people, and it seemed to me that the
proper occupation of every sensible man should consist in the mere fact of
having a mummy’s foot upon his desk.37
The impertinence arises from the equivalence that the idle narrator attri-
butes to “having a mummy’s foot upon his desk” and the notion of “occu-
pation.” In other words, the social cliché echoed and parodied here is the
utilitarian maxim stipulating that every man must have an occupation.
Later, when Princess Hermonthis appears in the protagonist’s room hop-
ping around on her remaining foot seeking her missing limb, the Dandiacal
irony reaches its apogee, highlighting once again the contrast between the
foot’s aesthetic value to the protagonist, to whom it “seemed a Corinthian
bronze, a work of the best era of art” (Gautier 1840), and its functional
value as a limb to its original owner. In light of Lovecraft’s affinity with the
art-for-art’s-sake ideology that underpins his understanding of the role of
the fiction writer, it is likely that he not only fully comprehended the
implications of Gautier’s impertinent narrative wit but absorbed its logic
in his own writing, as in the case of other Dandiacal writers whose works
he praises.
Likewise, in addition to Huysmans in Against Nature, Walter Pater,
high priest of Aestheticism, and his acolyte, Oscar Wilde, proponent of
New Hedonism, both revolutionary heirs to Brummell’s legacy, offer
their respective Decadent variants of the Dandy’s impertinence. Pater,
through whom “French Romanticism’s reinvention of the dandy […]
finds its intellectual organization” (Meisel 1999, 67), celebrates early
Christianity as the fulfilment of the pagan ideal of Epicureanism through
the spiritual transformation of the novel’s protagonist, Marius, one for
whom “there were the evils, the vices, which he avoided as, essentially, a
failure in good taste”38 (my emphasis). Marius’ questionable conversion
to Catholicism in his dying moments, founded on his aesthetic apprecia-
tion of the form of early Christian ritual over its spiritual function on the
basis of what A. C. Benson, writing in 1906, highlights as Christianity’s
“sensuous appeal, its liturgical solemnities,”39 not only marks the high
point of his moral relativism but, more importantly, reveals the Dandiacal
irony inherent in his martyrdom. This impertinence, the novel’s subtle
undermining of the religious context it purports to champion in favour
of aesthetics, elicited scathing responses from its early readers. T. S.
Eliot’s damning critique, in which he attacks Pater by asserting that “the
146 V. RALICKAS
degradation of philosophy and religion, skilfully initiated by Arnold, is

competently continued by Pater” is perhaps the most memorable.40
Furthermore, Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), a novel that
Lovecraft holds in high esteem on account of its weird motif of the cor-
ruptible portrait (CE 2.111), offers a number of examples of Dandiacal
irony in the epigrams attributed to Lord Henry Wotton. The catalogue of
witticisms that stands as the novel’s preface, however, establishes an
explicit opposition between the useful or ethical and the beautiful that
both frames and problematizes a moral reading of the story, particularly in
its assertion that “all art is quite useless.”41 Finally, the entirety of the “bre-
viary of Decadence,”42 Huymans’ Against Nature, the little yellow book
so corrosive to Wilde’s Dorian, is impertinent in its radical undermining of
nature in favour of the artificial. In what likely stands as the most outland-
ish example of the Dandy’s inversion of social convention in defence of
aesthetics, Des Esseintes’ medical need to ingest food through his anus
compels his egotism to rise to its crowning height on account of the “per-
verse epicurism” that the peptone enemas prescribed by his doctor inspire
in him (Huysmans 1884, 194). Lovecraft may therefore commend the
formal, stylistic, or philosophical merits of respective works by Gautier,
Pater, Wilde, and Huysmans, yet these same texts also consistently offer a
rich and varied set of examples of the irony that characterizes literary
Dandyism, whose influence appears implicitly in some of his weird tales.
To be specific, Lovecraft’s own form of Dandiacal impertinence finds its
expression in the narrative voice of certain stories, and its scope concerns
primarily the opposition between the aesthetic and the didactic. A pro-
fessed Decadent,43 Lovecraft affirms in 1921 that “it is not [the i maginative
writer’s] business to fashion a pretty trifle to please the children, to point
a useful moral, to concoct superficial ‘uplift’ for the mid-Victorian hold-
over, or to rehash insolvable human problems didactically” (CE 5.47). In
his commendation of Poe, moreover, he emphasizes the writer’s ability
“to express and interpret events and sensations as they are, regardless of
how they tend or what they prove—good or evil, attractive or repulsive,
stimulating or depressing” (CE 2.101). As a result, the irony evident in
certain stories echoes the clichés common to the literary conventions or
the moral principles of his day.
“The Unnamable” (1923), “In the Vault” (1925), and “The Picture in
the House” (1920) offer telling examples of Lovecraft’s appropriation of
Dandiacal impertinence to further his own aims, a writer whose works, in
being founded “on a profound and elementary principle whose appeal, if
not always universal, must necessarily be poignant and permanent to

minds of the requisite sensitiveness” (CE 2.83), establish him as an elitist
writer of weird fiction. For instance, through his uncharacteristic use of
humour in “The Unnamable,” Lovecraft pokes fun at horror fiction’s
“puerile devices” and at his own predilection for “ending my stories with
sights or sounds which paralysed my heroes’ faculties.”44 Nonetheless, the
text’s terminal climax proves that, contrary to the perspective espoused by
those limited by a prosaic sensibility, the supernatural “is sufficiently com-
monplace for literary treatment” (Lovecraft, Dreams 83). On the other
hand, “In the Vault” coaxes the reader to eschew a moral textual interpre-
tation in preference of an aesthetic one. The narrator establishes this con-
trast from the first sentence, wherein he opines, “there is nothing more
absurd, as I view it, than that conventional association of the homely and
the wholesome which seems to pervade the psychology of the multitude”
([my emphases] Lovecraft, Dreams 137). Thus, it is not the “easy ethics of
its mortuary artist,” George Birch, but rather his poor taste that consti-
tutes Birch’s Achilles’ heel (a point underscored by the ironic nature of his
injury), since he was “without that modicum of imagination which holds
the average citizen within certain limits fixed by taste” ([my emphases]
Lovecraft, Dreams 139). Lacking a sense of propriety and proportion, his
decision to sever the ankles of Asaph Sawyer’s corpse to fit into a smaller
coffin constitutes both a practical and an aesthetic choice. In both cases,
the impertinence inherent in the narrative voice can be deciphered in the
implicit opposition it establishes between the conventional, either literary
or moral, and the superior aesthetic sensibility of the writer.
Notably, “Picture” merits further attention as a result of its explicit
conflation of the horror genre with a rarefied aesthetic sensibility.
Specifically, the narrator identifies his aesthetic affinities by means of the
paradox “epicure in the terrible.”45 If we consider the philosophical origin
of the term “epicure,” Epicureanism, for which pleasure is the highest
good,46 Lovecraft not only emphasizes his narrator’s Decadent form of
moral relativism but also challenges a didactic reading of the text. However,
the narrator’s impertinence becomes apparent in his pronouncement on
the Puritans: “these folk were not beautiful in their sins. Erring as all mor-
tals must, they were forced by their rigid code to seek concealment above
all else; so that they came to use less and less taste in what they concealed”
([my emphases] Lovecraft, Call 35). Here the narrator’s censure of the
Puritans supplants what ought to be a moral judgement for an aesthetic
one. As a result, the story insinuates that the deus ex machina whose timely
148 V. RALICKAS
vehemence saves the protagonist, the “titanic thunderbolt of thunder-

bolts” (Lovecraft, Call 42), a metonym for the divine, objects to the can-
nibal’s transgression on aesthetic rather than moral grounds. After all,
none of the characters appreciate the image depicting the transgressive act
in question with the disinterested gaze requisite to a judgement of the
beautiful (at least from a Kantian perspective). The narrator finds it “repel-
lent,” “bizarre,” “ghastly,” and “hideously incongruous” as a result of its
depiction of black men as white (Lovecraft, Call 40). Conversely, the old
cannibal is sexually aroused for precisely the same reason.47 To press the
matter further, perhaps Lovecraft intended a playful and rather crude pun
on the notion of taste; formally, the image is as unpalatable as the con-
sumption of human flesh. In each of the three aforementioned texts,
Lovecraft’s version of Dandiacal impertinence situates his stories in a con-
tinuum alongside “The Mummy’s Foot,” Marius the Epicurean, The
Picture of Dorian Gray, and Against Nature as a result of their implicit
opposition of myopic literary conventions or ethics and aesthetics, thereby
surreptitiously elevating the narrator, and by extension, the author, to the
status of arbiter of taste.
The Dandy—a figure embodying the ultimate standard in good taste as
well as social superiority—thus unequivocally buttresses Lovecraft’s ideal
sense of self as a New England gentleman,48 a fact made evident by means
of a close examination of his biography through his letters, key stories that
highlight the impertinence inherent in Lovecraft’s narrative voice, and his
extensive knowledge of Decadent authors in his seminal essay Supernatural
Horror in Literature. His formative years spent in his birth home, a locale
that served as a crucible fusing together the childhood influences that
helped to forge his identity as a man, predisposed him to favour the dis-
tinctly British mode of elitist masculinity popularized by Brummell during
the Regency period. Furthermore, as a rhetorical strategy whose irony
offers a barbed social commentary in defence of aesthetics, Dandyism sat-
urates the literature that Lovecraft read as a young man, a time when
Decadent authors enthralled him. His embracing of Dandiacal irony in
certain stories therefore speaks to his acceptance of Dandyism on an ideo-
logical level. It is therefore not surprising that he would share Baudelaire’s
political bias advocating an aristocracy of taste, albeit with the added
caveat in preference of Anglo-Saxon culture, an idiosyncrasy advancing his
own prejudices.
Lovecraft’s personal identification with the sober style of Brummellian
elegance and espousal of the foremost rhetorical strategy in literary
Dandyism’s arsenal are anything but gratuitous, however. In his influential

treatise, Barbey’s unreserved praise of Brummell, qualifying him as “the
greatest Dandy, not just of his time, but of all time” (Barbey 1845, 76),
whose impact, in Barbey’s view, was so remarkable that, had he so desired,
he would have been capable of reconquering George IV’s patronage after
insulting him publicly one too many times (Barbey 1845, 83), shows the
extent to which Brummell was idealized in a work that surreptitiously
positions its author as a connoisseur of elegance and, by extension, as a
member of the aesthetic elite, in recognizing Brummell’s art. Baudelaire
expresses a similar sentiment posthumously in 1887, albeit more suc-
cinctly: “Eternal superiority of the dandy” (“Intimate Papers” 229). He,
too, had a vested interest in adopting the Dandy persona: “Baudelaire
knew what the true situation of the man of letters was: He goes to the
marketplace as a Flâneur, supposedly to take a look at it, but in reality to
find a buyer.”49 Unlike the artist who is compelled to whore himself out in
the name of art—“What is art? Prostitution”50 (my translation)—the
Dandy escapes compromise since he is untouchable. His innate grace and
superior taste raise him above the masses.
If the logic sustaining the adoption of Dandyism by Baudelaire and
Barbey holds true, two writers who assume its protective shield as a strate-
gic means to champion their own taste as superior to that of the bourgeoi-
sie, thereby elevating their work above marketplace speculation, then
Lovecraft’s pose as a conservative British gentleman stands as nothing
short of a defensive ideological position. In aligning with some of the
principal precepts of Regency Dandyism, “the last spark of heroism amid
decadence” (Baudelaire, “Painter” 28), Lovecraft’s aristocratic, gentle-
manly pretensions, his use of Dandiacal irony in certain stories, and advo-
cacy of a ruling class based on taste are inextricably tied to his personal
sense of an ideal self that his time in New York served to undermine. In
other words, the subjective crisis at the root of Lovecraftian horror is also
unequivocally a gendered crisis undercutting a culturally and historically
specific form of masculinity, whose debt to Dandyism can be traced
throughout Lovecraft’s writing.
* * *
Acknowledgement My thanks to Matthew Flanagan at the Marianopolis College

Library for his invaluable research assistance.
150 V. RALICKAS
Notes
1. George Bryan Brummell’s ascendancy over the British aristocracy during
the late eighteenth century established him as the figurehead of Regency
Dandyism, a form of masculinity noted for its sartorial sobriety, debonair
manners, and cutting wit. For a compelling biographical study of Brummell,
see Ian Kelly, Beau Brummell: The Ultimate Dandy (London: Hodder and
Stoughton Ltd., 2005). Conversely, in the form of Dandyism championed
by Oscar Wilde, heavily imbued with the Aestheticism of the late nine-
teenth century, sartorial elegance becomes an expressive art form, and the
Dandy’s social performance turns inward as a result of his cultivation of
exquisite sensibilities. See Steven Calloway, “Wilde and the Dandyism of
the Senses,” The Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde, edited by Peter
Raby (Cambridge UP, 1997), 34–54.
2. The “clean and proper” body is Leon S. Roudiez’s translation of Julia
Kristeva’s term “le corps propre,” which denotes both the subject’s owner-
ship of his or her body and the cleanliness and propriety of the body in
question (see Kristeva, Pouvoirs de l’horreur: Essai sur l’abjection, Editions
du Seuil, 1980; The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, translated by
Leon S. Roudiez, Columbia UP, 1984).
3. For a seminal analysis of abjection in Lovecraft’s fiction, see Vivian Ralickas,
“‘Cosmic Horror’ and the Question of the Sublime in Lovecraft,” Journal
of the Fantastic in the Arts 18, no. 3 (2007): 364–398. More recently,
other scholars have also considered the implications of a Kristevan approach
to Lovecraftian horror. See David Simmons, “‘A Certain Resemblance’:
Abject Hybridity in H. P. Lovecraft’s Short Fiction,” in New Critical Essays
on H.P. Lovecraft, edited by David Simmons (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2013), 13–30.
4. Campbell J. Gibson and Emily Lennon, “Table 4,” Historical Census
Statistics on the Foreign-Born Population of the United States: 1850–1990
(Washington, DC: United States Census Bureau, 1999), https://www.
census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0029/twps0029.
html.
5. Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab, Jews and the New American Scene
(Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London: Harvard UP, 1995), 19.
6. [LNY] Howard Phillips Lovecraft, H. P. Lovecraft: Letters from New York,
edited by S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz (San Francisco and Portland:
Night Shade Books, 2005), 36.
7. Rhett S. Jones, “Rhode Island,” Encyclopedia of African-American Culture
and History, edited by Jack Salzman, David Lionel Smith, and Cornel West
(Macmillan Library Reference, 1996), 2323.
8. [IAP] S. T. Joshi, I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H. P. Lovecraft,

2 vols (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2010 & 2013), 1.27.
9. Howard Phillips Lovecraft, H. P. Lovecraft: Selected Letters 1929–1931,
vol. 3, edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei (Sauk City,
Wisconsin: Arkham House Publishers Inc., 1976), 362.
10. L. Sprague De Camp, H. P. Lovecraft: A Biography (New York: Barnes &
Noble Books, 1996), 2–3; 27.
11. [LAG] Howard Phillips Lovecraft, Letters to Alfred Galpin, edited by S. T.
Joshi and David E. Schultz (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2003), 204.
12. [ES] Howard Phillips Lovecraft, Essential Solitude: The Letters of H. P.
Lovecraft and August Derleth, 2 vols, edited by David E. Schultz and S. T.
Joshi (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2013), 1.64–5.
13. Sean Homer, Jacques Lacan (London and New York: Routledge, 2005),
61.
14. Lovecraft was likely familiar with Barbey’s 1882 novel Une histoire sans
nom (A Story Without A Name), since his library contained a copy of the
first English translation of the work by Edgar Saltus, dated 1891, in which
Saltus introduces Barbey as a Dandy in explicit terms. See Barbey
d’Aurevilly, A Story Without A Name, translated by Edgar Saltus, 1891
(New York: Brentano’s, 1919), 5–23. For a complete listing of the con-
tents of Lovecraft’s library, see S. T. Joshi, Lovecraft’s Library: A Catalogue
(New York: Hippocampus Press, 2002).
15. Jules-Amédée Barbey d’Aurevilly, On Dandyism and George Brummell,
1845, translated by George Walden (London: Gibson Square Books,
2002), 110.
16. Ian Kelly, Beau Brummell: The Ultimate Dandy (London: Hodder and
Stoughton Ltd., 2005), 4.
17. Perry Meisel, The Cowboy and the Dandy: Crossing Over from Romanticism
to Rock and Roll (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999),
68.
18. Captain Jesse, The Life of George Brummell, Esq., Commonly Called Beau
Brummell, vol. 1 (London: J.C. Nimmo, 1886), 56.
19. Max Beerbohm, “Dandies and Dandies,” 1896, The Works of Max
Beerbohm, edited by John Lane (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1922),
3–34, 4.
20. [CE] Howard Phillips Lovecraft, Collected Essays, 5 vols., edited by S. T.
Joshi (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2004–06), 2.91, 2.99.
21. Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life,” 1863, The Painter of
Modern Life and Other Essays, translated by Jonathan Mayne (London:
Phaidon Press, 1964), 4.
22. See Lovecraft’s letters to Lillian, dated 5 June 1925; 6 July 1925; 14
October 1925; and 24 October 1925 in H. P. Lovecraft: Letters from
152 V. RALICKAS
New York, edited by S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz (San Francisco and
Portland: Night Shade Books, 2005).
23. Karin Becker, Le dandysme littéraire en France au XIXe siècle (Orléans:
Éditions Paradigme, 2010), 29.
24. Louise Foxcroft, Calories and Corsets: A History of Dieting Over 2,000
Years (London: Profile Books Ltd., 2011), 53.
25. Howard Phillips Lovecraft, H. P. Lovecraft: Selected Letters 1932–34, vol. 4,
edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei (Sauk City, Wisconsin:
Arkham House Publishers Inc., 1976), 356.
26. [LRK] Howard Phillips Lovecraft, Letters to Rheinhart Kleiner, edited by
S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2005),
166.
27. Interestingly, in 1915 Lovecraft confesses his fascination with a Dandy
ancestor of the Regency period who fell into ruin on account of his disso-
lute lifestyle. See S. T. Joshi, I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H. P.
Lovecraft, vol. 1 (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2010), 4.
28. Note that Lovecraft’s knowledge of Baudelaire’s literary works dates back
earlier, as he speaks of citing from Frank Pearce Sturm’s 1906 translation
of Baudelaire’s poetry in a letter penned in the spring of 1920. See Howard
Phillips Lovecraft, Letters to Rheinhart Kleiner, edited by S. T. Joshi and
David E. Schultz (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2005), 190.
29. Charles Baudelaire, “Intimate Papers from the Unpublished Works of
Baudelaire,” 1887, in Baudelaire: His Prose And Poetry, edited by T. R.
Smith, translated by Joseph T. Shipley (New York: Boni & Liveright, Inc.,
1919), https://archive.org/stream/baudelairehispro00baudiala/baude-
lairehispro00baudiala_djvu.txt, 223.
30. [SL2] Howard Phillips Lovecraft, H. P. Lovecraft: Selected Letters 1925–29,
vol. 2, edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei (Sauk City,
Wisconsin: Arkham House Publishers Inc., 1968), 308.
31. S. T. Joshi, foreword to “Mechanist Materialist” in Miscellaneous Writings
by H. P. Lovecraft (Sauk City, Wisconsin: Arkham House Publishers Inc.,
1995), 129–132, 131.
32. S. T. Joshi, Lovecraft’s Library: A Catalogue (New York: Hippocampus
Press, 2002), 83.
33. Steven J Mariconda, “‘The Hound’—A Dead Dog?” Crypt of Cthulhu vol.
38 (1986): 3–7.
34. See Baudelaire’s “Dandy” in “Le peintre de la vie moderne,” Œuvres
Complètes, vol. 2, edited by Claude Pichois (Paris: Editions Gallimard,
1976), 709. For Carlyle, see “The Dandiacal Body” in Sartor Resartus,
1833–34, edited by Kerry McSweeney and Peter Sabor (Oxford and
New York: Oxford UP, 1987), 207–217. For an in-depth analysis of the
connection between Dandyism and Victorian asceticism as a formative
component of masculinity, see James Eli Adams, Dandies and Desert

Saints: Styles of Victorian Masculinity (Ithaca and London: Cornell UP,
1995).
35. Joris-Karl Huysmans, Against Nature (A Rebours), 1884, translated by
Robert Baldick, edited by Patrick McGuinness (London and New York:
Penguin Books, 2003), 12–13.
36. Sima Godfrey, “The Dandy as Ironic Figure,” Sub-Stance vol. 36 (1982):
21–33, 30.
37. Théophile Gautier, “The Mummy’s Foot,” 1840, translated by Lafcadio
Hearn, 1908 (The University of Adelaide Library, 27 February 2014),
https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/g/gautier/theophile/mummys-foot/.
38. Walter Pater, Marius the Epicurean, 1885 (Middlesex, England and
New York: Penguin Books, 1985), 178.
39. A. C. Benson, Walter Pater (New York: Macmillan & co., 1906), 111.
40. T. S. Eliot, “Arnold and Pater,” 1930, Selected Essays (London: Faber and
Faber Limited, 1999), 431–443, 437.
41. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891 (London and New York:
Penguin Books, 2003), 4.
42. Arthur Symons, “J. K. Huysmans,” The Fortnightly Review (March 1892),
http://www.huysmans.org/criticism/fortnightly.htm.
43. For an enlightening analysis of Lovecraft’s connection with the Decadents,
see Barton Levi St-Armand, H. P. Lovecraft: New England Decadent
(Rhode Island: WaterFire Providence, 2013), Kindle e-book.
44. Howard Phillips Lovecraft, The Dreams in the Witch House and Other
Weird Stories, edited by S. T. Joshi (London and New York: Penguin
Books, 2004), 82.
45. Howard Phillips Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories,
edited by S. T. Joshi (London and New York: Penguin Books, 1999), 34.
46. Tim O’Keefe, Epicureanism (New York: Routledge, 2014), 107.
47. For an analysis of the sexual context in “Picture,” see Vivian Ralickas, “Art,
‘Cosmic Horror,’ and the Fetishizing Gaze in the Fiction of H. P.
Lovecraft,” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts vol. 19, no. 3 (2008):
297–316.
48. Sima Godfrey, “The Dandy as Ironic Figure,” Sub-Stance vol. 36 (1982):
21–33, 24.
49. Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High
Capitalism, translated by Harry Zohn (London: NLB, 1973), 34.
50. Charles Baudelaire Œuvres Complètes, vol. 1, edited by Claude Pichois
(Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1975), 649.
CHAPTER 8
Lovecraft and the Titans: A Critical Legacy
S. T. Joshi
Edmund Wilson’s hostile review of Lovecraft, “Tales of the Marvellous

and the Ridiculous” (New Yorker, November 24, 1945), chiefly focused
on the perceived deficiencies in Lovecraft’s fiction, including the notori-
ous put-down, “The only real horror in most of these fictions is the horror
of bad taste and bad art.”1 Wilson’s prejudice against genre fiction (he
condemned both the detective story and Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings in
terms scarcely less censorious) largely accounts for his blind eye toward
Lovecraft, but what is curious about his review is the frequency with which
Wilson finds himself grudgingly praising various aspects of Lovecraft’s
work. In regard to Supernatural Horror in Literature (which Wilson read
in the Ben Abramson edition of 1945), he notes: “his long essay on the
literature of the supernatural horror is a really able piece of work. He
shows his lack of sound literary taste in his enthusiasms for Machen and
Dunsany, whom he more or less acknowledged as models, but he had read
comprehensively in this special field—he was strong on the Gothic novel-
ists—and writes about it with much intelligence.”2
There is at least one inaccuracy here—Lovecraft was not in fact “strong”
on the Gothic novelists, having read them fairly cursorily and deriving much
of his information about them from Edith Birkhead’s treatise The Tale of
Terror (1921)—but the suggestion that Lovecraft overvalued Machen and
S. T. Joshi (*)
Independent Scholar, Seattle, WA, USA

156 S. T. JOSHI
Dunsany, on the grounds that he was significantly influenced by them, is an

accusation made even by more sympathetic critics. In a review of the first
omnibus of Lovecraft’s tales, The Outsider and Others (1939), T. O.
Mabbott, the leading Poe scholar of his generation, remarks in passing that
Lovecraft “tends to underrate Stevenson, and overrate Dunsany.”3
These comments may have more to do with the declining reputations
of Machen and Dunsany in the mid-twentieth century than with any
flaws in Lovecraft’s critical judgment. For I maintain that the bulk of lit-
erary scholarship on weird fiction in the 90 years following the first pub-
lication of Supernatural Horror in Literature emphatically endorses the
prescience of Lovecraft’s identification, in the tenth and final chapter of
his treatise, of the four “modern masters” of the weird tale in his era:
Arthur Machen (1863–1947), Lord Dunsany (1878–1957), Algernon
Blackwood (1869–1951), and M. R. James (1862–1936). Lovecraft’s
judgments on these writers are the more remarkable given how relatively
late in his own life he first read them—in one case, only a few months
before beginning the initial composition of the essay itself.
Lovecraft Reads the Titans

Peter Penzoldt may have been right in remarking, in The Supernatural in
Fiction (1952), that Lovecraft was “too well read,” meaning that “he was
influenced by so many authors that one is often at a loss to decide what is
really Lovecraft and what some half-conscious memory of the books he
has read”4; but recent scholarship has found repeated instances of Lovecraft
coming upon a particular motif or image independently of a perceived
literary influence, or years before he read the author in question. This is
strikingly the case with Lord Dunsany, whom Lovecraft idolized for sev-
eral years after first encountering his work in the fall of 1919. More than a
year previously, he had written “Polaris,” a tale that seems strikingly
“Dunsanian” in its use of a dream-setting and prose-poetic language; but
no such influence is possible. Lovecraft went on to read the bulk of
Dunsany’s bejeweled early story collections, from The Gods of Pegāna
(1905) to Tales of Three Hemispheres (1919), as well as his early collections
of fantastic plays; and he cites or alludes to all these works in his discussion
of Dunsany in Supernatural Horror in Literature.
Lovecraft’s ignorance of Dunsany until 1919 is explicable only by
assuming that he thought Dunsany’s work was of a whimsically fantastic
sort that left little room for the cosmic horror he preferred. In 1929,
LOVECRAFT AND THE TITANS: A CRITICAL LEGACY 157
c ommenting on his first reading of A Dreamer’s Tales (1910), he noted

that “I had never read anything of Dunsany’s [before 1919], though
knowing of him by reputation. The book had been recommended to me
by one whose judgment I did not highly esteem.”5 This person was Alice
M. Hamlet, a woman associated with the amateur journalism movement
in which Lovecraft was involved. Hamlet apparently urged Lovecraft to
read the book in anticipation of hearing Dunsany lecture in Boston in
October 1919. The effect was immediate: “The first paragraph arrested
me as with an electric shock, & I had not read two pages before I became
a Dunsany devotee for life.”6
Lovecraft came upon Arthur Machen around 1923. Here too his dis-
covery is anomalously late, for Machen had become celebrated—indeed,
notorious—as one of the more daring writers of the “Yellow Nineties,”
when his novella “The Great God Pan” (1894) was condemned in reviews
as the outpouring of a diseased mind. Machen produced much of the work
for which we remember him today in what has been called his “great
decade” of writing (roughly 1890–1901), although it is true that some of
the works written during this period—such as the sensitive novel The Hill
of Dreams (1907)—were only published years later. But by 1925, when
Lovecraft began writing his essay, Machen was a fully established figure in
general literature—indeed, in some literary circles he was already coming
to be regarded as somewhat passé. Lovecraft had no excuse for not read-
ing Machen earlier; unlike Dunsany, Machen wrote exactly the kind of
documentary-style supernatural horror that Lovecraft himself would
spend his entire career refining.
As with Dunsany, Lovecraft’s discovery of Machen occurred through
the recommendation of a friend—in this case, his fiery young colleague
Frank Belknap Long (1901–1994), who was urging Lovecraft to get out
of his fixation with the eighteenth century and read all manner of contem-
porary writers, from T. S. Eliot to Sherwood Anderson. And yet, one of
Lovecraft’s earliest comments on Machen, in a letter to Long, is of
interest:
And I have read The Hill of Dreams!! Surely a masterpiece—though I hope

it isn’t quite as autobiographical as some reviewers claim. I’d hate to think
of Machen himself as that young neurotic with his sloppy sentimentalities,
his couch of thorns, his urban eccentricities, and all that! But Pegāna, what
an imagination! Cut out the emotional hysteria, and you have a marvellously
appealing character—how vivid is that exquisite Roman day-dreaming! …
158 S. T. JOSHI
even if the spirit is sadly un-Roman. Machen is a Titan—perhaps the greatest

living author—and I must read everything of his. But Dunsany is closer to
my own personality and understanding. Machen has an hysterical intensity
which I neither experience nor understand—a seriousness which is a philo-
sophical limitation. But Dunsany is myself, plus an art and cultivation infi-
nitely greater. His cosmic realm is the realm in which I live, his distant,
emotionless vistas of the beauty of moonlight on quaint and ancient roofs
are the vistas I know and cherish.7
This statement is of intense interest, and I shall return to some aspects of

it later; but here we can say that Lovecraft immediately recognized that
Machen’s “hysterical intensity” (a code word for Machen’s devout Anglo-
Catholicism) was antipodal to the lofty “indifferentism”8 toward human
affairs and all human life that he and Dunsany, both atheists, shared.
Lovecraft’s response to Algernon Blackwood is very curious. It had
previously been thought that he first encountered Blackwood only in
1924, when he waxed enthusiastic about reading “The Willows” (which
he later declared the finest weird tale in all literature) in The Listener and
Other Stories (1907): “One of the tales in this book, ‘The Willows’, is per-
haps the most devastating piece of supernaturally hideous suggestion
which I have beheld in a decade.”9 But recently a letter dating to 1920 has
surfaced in which Lovecraft expresses a much more mixed view of
Blackwood. Having received a copy of Incredible Adventures (1914) from
his friend James F. Morton, Lovecraft writes: “I can’t say that I am very
much enraptured, for somehow Blackwood lacks the power to create a
really haunting atmosphere. He is too diffuse, for one thing; and for
another thing, his horrors and weirdness are too obviously symbolical—
symbolical rather than convincingly outré.”10
The remarkable thing is that Incredible Adventures is the very volume
that Lovecraft later singled out as the pinnacle of Blackwood’s achieve-
ment. In Supernatural Horror in Literature, he states (in direct contradic-
tion to his comment of 1920): “Some of these accounts are hardly stories
at all, but rather studies in elusive impressions and half-remembered
snatches of dream. Plot is everywhere negligible, and atmosphere reigns
untrammelled” (88). In a later letter he elaborates: “A weird story, to be a
serious aesthetic effort, must form primarily a picture of a mood—and such
a picture certainly does not call for any clever jack-in-the-box fillip. There
are weird stories which more or less conform to this description … espe-
cially in Blackwood’s Incredible Adventures.”11 Lovecraft’s less than
e nthusiastic response to Blackwood in 1920 may stem from his enrapture-

ment with Dunsany at that juncture: it becomes evident that he was so
taken with Dunsany’s exquisite prose-poetry (which he himself attempted,
unsuccessfully, to duplicate in some of his own tales) that Blackwood’s
somewhat workmanlike prose did not evoke a chord with him. Later
Lovecraft recognized that Blackwood’s keen portrayal of an individual’s
psychological response to fear, terror, wonder, and awe is his greatest liter-
ary strength.
Lovecraft came upon M. R. James as late as mid-December 1925, sev-
eral weeks after he had received the offer from W. Paul Cook to write
Supernatural Horror in Literature, in November. The earliest known
mention of James in Lovecraft’s correspondence occurs in a letter to his
aunt, Lillian D. Clark, dated December 13, 1925, when he speaks of going
to the New York Public Library to “read the ghost stories of Montague
Rhodes James.”12 The reference is apparently to Ghost Stories of An
Antiquary (1904), although Lovecraft quickly read James’s three subse-
quent volumes of ghost stories, concluding with A Warning to the Curious
(1925). By late January he was conducting a vigorous course of reading
and rereading the classics of weird fiction in preparation for writing the
various chapters of his essay, and he refers to “my new idol of idols, the
erudite Montague Rhodes James … James’ mastery of horror is almost
unsurpassable.” He goes on to say: “I am eager to get hold of … his very
recent (just reviewed) new volume for grown-ups—‘A Warning to the
Curious’. I shall give James very prominent mention in my article.”13
I do not wish to examine Lovecraft’s actual discussion of the four
“modern masters” in Supernatural Horror in Literature, except to note a
few peculiar features. The segment on Arthur Machen begins grandly: “Of
living creators of cosmic fear raised to its most artistic pitch, few if any can
hope to equal the versatile Arthur Machen” (81). This may be one of sev-
eral instances where Lovecraft uses the word “cosmic” almost ornamen-
tally, or as a general term of praise. For in fact Machen’s work is not
notably “cosmic” in the sense that Lovecraft understood the term, at least
as applied to his own work—the depiction of the vast gulfs of space and
time and the resultant insignificance, physical and moral, of the human
race within those gulfs. This is not at all the focus of Machen’s writing. As
a devout Christian whose hostility to science as the destroyer of mankind’s
comforting illusions of self-importance was unremitting, Machen was the
very last person to be a proponent of cosmicism. Much of his work—and
this applies not only to “The Great God Pan” but also to “The White
160 S. T. JOSHI
People,” which Lovecraft decreed the second greatest weird tale in litera-
ture, after “The Willows”—is focused on departures from religious ortho-
doxy (especially in sexual matters), which he was able to depict as symbols
for both physical and psychological aberration. A later letter, written in
1932, shows Lovecraft’s grasp of this point:
I’d a great deal rather have Machen as he is than not have him at all! What
Machen probably likes about perverted and forbidden things is their depar-
ture from and hostility to the commonplace. To him—whose imagination is
not cosmic—they represent what Pegāna and the River Yann represent to
Dunsany, whose imagination is cosmic. People whose minds are—like
Machen’s—steeped in the orthodox myths of religion, naturally find a poi-
gnant fascination in the conception of things which religion brands with
outlawry and horror. Such people take the artificial and obsolete concept of
“sin” seriously, and find it full of dark allurement.14
This letter is actually a far more acute analysis of the essence of Machen’s
weird work than the fulsome praise we find in Supernatural Horror in
Literature.
As for Dunsany, Lovecraft admits to his admiration of the “sorcery of
[his] crystalline singing prose,” going on to say with considerable hyper-
bole: “His point of view is the most truly cosmic of any held in the litera-
ture of any period” (89). Stating rather tritely that “Beauty rather than
terror is the keynote of Dunsany’s work” (90), Lovecraft nonetheless
emphasizes the horrific undercurrent inherent in Dunsany’s prodigal cre-
ation of fantastic cities, gods, and monsters.
Blackwood, in many ways, becomes for Lovecraft the model for weird
writing; and although he still harps on Blackwood’s lack of “notable com-
mand of the poetic witchery of mere words,” he realizes the English writer’s
approach to the weird is exemplary:
no one has ever approached the skill, seriousness, and minute fidelity with
which he records the overtones of strangeness in ordinary things and experi-
ences, or the preternatural insight with which he builds up detail by detail
the complete sensations and perceptions leading from reality into supernor-
mal life or vision. … Above all others he understands how fully some sensi-
tive minds dwell forever on the borderland of dream, and how relatively
slight is the distinction betwixt those images formed from actual objects and
those excited by the play of the imagination. (87)
As for James, what is remarkable in Lovecraft’s analysis is that a sub-

stantial proportion of it is spent on a plot synopsis of a single story, “Count
Magnus.” This is because what Lovecraft truly admired in James was what
might be called the architecture of his tales: the extraordinarily complex
structure of some of his longer narratives, resulting in an extreme disjunc-
tion between the events as they occur in chronological sequence and the
events as they are recounted in the story. This disjunction, indeed, is
something Lovecraft himself adopted in his later novelettes and novellas,
and it is highly likely that James provided a kind of working model of how
it could be done. Later, Lovecraft made this feature a central component
of his theory of weird fiction writing; in the essay “Notes on Writing Weird
Fiction” (1933), he advised writers to prepare two synopses for a story,
one portraying “events in the order of their absolute occurrence” and the
other portraying events “in order of narration (not actual occurrence).”15
Indeed, the extent to which these two synopses diverge is a key to the
structural complexity of a given tale.
This emphasis on James as literary architect is not at all surprising,
because the actual content of James’s writing is about as far from
Lovecraftian cosmic horror as it is possible to get. While it is true that
some of James’s “ghosts” are more or less material—as Lovecraft memo-
rably observed in his essay, “the average James ghost is lean, dwarfish, and
hairy—a sluggish, hellish night-abomination midway betwixt beast and
man” (92)—others are of the more conventional immaterial sort, embody-
ing a philosophical dualism that Lovecraft the mechanistic materialist
would have rejected. And James was also the culmination of the British
ghost story tradition—a tradition Lovecraft appreciated with no great
enthusiasm, as a letter of 1933 suggests: “the Victorians went in strongly
for weird fiction—Bulwer-Lytton, Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Harrison
Ainsworth, Mrs. Oliphant, George W. M. Reynolds, H. Rider Haggard,
R. L. Stevenson and countless others turned out reams of it.”16
Lovecraft’s Later Views of the Titans

It is of some interest to note what Lovecraft thought of the work of the
“modern masters” subsequent to the publication of his essay. On the sur-
face it may seem remarkable—given that three of the four “modern mas-
ters” outlived Lovecraft by 10, 14, and 20 years—that Lovecraft did not
revise this tenth chapter to any significant degree for the Fantasy Fan seri-
alization of 1933–1935 (in the event, the serialization had proceeded only
162 S. T. JOSHI
to the middle of chapter eight when the magazine folded); but a study of
these writers’ subsequent work—and, more relevantly, Lovecraft’s response
to it—may cause us to be less surprised.
As has been suggested, Machen’s best work was long behind him even
when the first version of Supernatural Horror in Literature came to be
written. The nine-volume Caerleon Edition of his Works (1923) was in
this sense almost an epitaph. The last work Lovecraft takes note of is “The
Shining Pyramid,” a story first published in 1895, but which Lovecraft
probably read in one of two competing volumes titled The Shining Pyramid
(1924, 1925), one assembled by Vincent Starrett, the other compiled by
Machen. After this date, Machen’s publications largely consist of collec-
tions of his essays and journalism or reprints of his earlier work. The late
weird novel The Green Round (1933) appeared just at the time Lovecraft
was revising his essay for the Fantasy Fan, but in his reaction to it, he
strained to be polite:
It is really extremely interesting—with some very potent reflections of that

persistent sense of unreal worlds impinging on the real world which many
imaginative persons possess. In the casualness & unexplainedness of the
phenomena represented, it recalls some of Machen’s queer prefaces—such
as that to “The Three Impostors”. Its faults are—mainly—a certain ram-
bling diffuseness, & over-use of typical stylistic mannerisms. Also—the pol-
tergeist manifestations tend to be somewhat hackneyed. Hardly one of
Machen’s greatest—but typically Machenian for all that.17
The case of Dunsany is of much greater interest. Lovecraft diligently

read nearly every publication by the Anglo-Irish author subsequent to
Tales of Three Hemispheres (1919) but discussed none of them in the
revised Supernatural Horror in Literature. He repeatedly chastised
Dunsany for abandoning the prose-poetic manner of his early work,
although he noted a partial return to this idiom in the superb novel The
King of Elfland’s Daughter (1924). But Dunsany himself was evolving
creatively, and he had clearly said everything he had to say in that early
manner; his novels, from The Chronicles of Rodriguez (1922) to The Curse
of the Wise Woman (1933), all feature a greater infusion of the “real” world
and its concerns but still exhibit a delicate and ethereal weirdness. What is
more, Lovecraft’s own work was evolving in nearly the same manner, as he
himself abandoned Dunsanian fantasy for the documentary realism of his
later, longer tales. But he continued to express impatience with Dunsany’s

evolution, as he wrote very late in life to Fritz Leiber:
As he gained in age and sophistication, he lost in freshness and simplicity.

He was ashamed to be uncritically naïve, and began to step aside from his
tales and visibly smile at them even as they unfolded. Instead of remaining
what the true fantaisiste must be—a child in a child’s world of dream—he
became anxious to show that he was really an adult good-naturedly pretend-
ing to be a child in a child’s world.18
I maintain that this is a seriously erroneous portrayal of the early Dunsany,

which is hardly “naive” but is itself highly sophisticated in its implicit athe-
ism and cynicism. Lovecraft (and, to be fair, many other readers) may have
been duped by the surface naïveté of those early tales, which deliberately
reflect what I have termed an “aesthetic animism”19 that underscores the
fundamental unity between human beings and the natural world—a unity
that industrial civilization has broken and is on the verge of destroying.
But Lovecraft could not get beyond Dunsany’s evocation of pure fantasy,
expressed in some of the most gorgeous prose-poetry in all English
literature.
As for Blackwood, he too, like Machen, suffered a certain deflation of
his inspiration following what could be called his “great half-decade” of
writing (1908–1914), when the unexpected popular success of John
Silence—Physician Extraordinary (1908) allowed him to spend several
years in Switzerland writing whatever he wished without concern for
income or markets. This period culminated in Incredible Adventures, the
last work Lovecraft discusses in his essay. After this date, Blackwood pro-
duced some uninspired story collections and a few novels of no great
interest. Lovecraft owned Julius LeVallon (1916), but he only obtained
his copy in 1933,20 and it is not clear if he had read this work earlier. In
late 1936 he received a copy of Blackwood’s late collection Shocks (1935)
as a Christmas present from August Derleth; indeed, he had the book
with him when he went to the hospital in March 1937 during his terminal
illness.21 But he has left no account of his opinion of the contents of the
book.
M. R. James wrote relatively little weird fiction subsequent to A
Warning to the Curious (1925). Although Lovecraft celebrated the appear-
ance of James’s Collected Ghost Stories in 1931, he himself did not obtain
the book, since he already owned James’s four separate collections of
164 S. T. JOSHI
ghost stories. The volume does include a few additional tales, but they are
of little consequence.
Lovecraft’s attitude toward James underwent a fairly significant—and
downward—revision as his own work evolved from relatively conventional
macabre tales such as “The Tomb” (1917) and “The Outsider” (1921) to
the cosmic horror of “The Call of Cthulhu” (1926) and At the Mountains
of Madness (1931). While defending him against the opinions of some col-
leagues (such as the young J. Vernon Shea) who apparently felt James was
a bit tame and conventional in his weird scenarios, Lovecraft himself
acknowledged James’s weaknesses:
About M. R. James—I think I can see what you mean, but can’t classify him
quite as low as you do. And if you can’t see his utter, prodigious, & literally
incalculable superiority to the W.T. [Weird Tales] plodders I must again urge
you to give your sense of appreciation a radical analysis & overhauling.
James has a sense of dramatic values & an eye for hideous intrusions upon
the commonplace that none of the pulp groundlings could even approach if
they tried all their pitiful lives. But I’ll concede he isn’t really in the Machen,
Blackwood, & Dunsany class. He is the earthiest member of the “big four.”22
Along with this revised evaluation of James came an increasing admira-

tion for the work of Walter de la Mare (1873–1956). De la Mare, whose
novel The Return (1910) probably influenced Lovecraft’s The Case of
Charles Dexter Ward (1927) and whose two story collections, The Riddle
and Other Stories (1923) and The Connoisseur and Other Stories (1926),
Lovecraft owned, wrote extraordinarily subtle weird tales that deeply
probed the shifting psychological states of characters encountering the
bizarre. For all Lovecraft’s fundamental lack of interest in character-driven
fiction (“Individuals and their fortunes within natural law move me very
little. They are all momentary trifles bound from a common nothingness
toward another common nothingness”23), he was keenly aware of the
power and evocativeness of de la Mare’s stories, even if some of them
tended toward an almost impenetrable opacity.
De la Mare, indeed, almost missed being included in the original ver-
sion of Supernatural Horror in Literature altogether. Lovecraft only came
upon him after having largely finished the initial draft of his essay in the
spring of 1926. Upon his return to Providence from New York on April
17, he conducted some further research on weird writers at the Providence
Public Library; and it was then that he discovered de la Mare. Writing in
late May to Frank Belknap Long, Lovecraft wrote: “I have not yet read his
prose lucubrations: a thing which I really ought to do before giving my
article a final form. I had been of opinion that Mr. D. shared the some-
what insipid whimsicality of Mr. [J. M.] Barrie, but ’tis easily possible that
his fantasies have the sombre suggestiveness of Mr. Blackwood as well.”24
A few weeks later, he wrote: “De la Mare can be exceedingly powerful
when he chooses, and I only wish he’d choose oftener.”25 But Lovecraft’s
admiration of the British writer was sufficient for him to write several para-
graphs about his work in chapter nine of his essay. With the passing of
years, his evaluation of de la Mare only increased, so that by 1934 he was
referring to the “latest achievements of Blackwood or Machen or de la
Mare or Dunsany”26 as the pinnacles of contemporary weird fiction. Had
Lovecraft written Supernatural Horror in Literature in 1934, de la Mare
would likely have replaced James as one of the four “modern masters.”
Contemporary Views of the Titans

Given the extent to which weird fiction in general remains a pariah to
mainstream or academic criticism, it is difficult to state definitively whether
Lovecraft’s identification of Machen, Dunsany, Blackwood, and James as
the titans of weird fiction in his day—the culmination of a literary tradition
that began with the Gothic writers and proceeded through the revolution-
ary work of Edgar Allan Poe—has been confirmed by subsequent scholar-
ship. The best we can say is that, gauged by these authors’ current status
among readers, publishers, and critics, Lovecraft’s evaluation does indeed
appear to be sound.
The chief reason for this—and the chief reason why an author like de la
Mare has not attained a similar level of popularity among devotees of the
weird—is that these four writers (and, of course, Lovecraft himself, who
has now taken his place among them) devoted nearly all their fictional
work to the weird, thereby allowing readers to sample volume after vol-
ume of their work. Many significant works of weird fiction were essentially
“one-shot” ventures by authors whose chief fictional focus was else-
where—a point embodied perhaps most notably by the endlessly antholo-
gized story “The Monkey’s Paw” (1902) by the British humorist W. W.
Jacobs.
Machen is perhaps the most problematical in this regard, for his weird
work is largely confined to the episodic novel The Three Impostors (1895),
the story collection The House of Souls (1906), the short novel The Terror
166 S. T. JOSHI
(1917), and two late collections that appeared in 1936 but which are not
highly regarded. But Philip Van Doren Stern’s splendid compilation of
Machen’s Tales of Horror and the Supernatural (1948)—published in the
United States by Knopf in 1948 (an extension of that publisher’s cam-
paign to introduce Machen to the American reading public, begun in the
early 1920s)—has remained in print for most of the past 70 years and has
been widely available in paperback in both the United States and the
United Kingdom.
Criticism of Machen remains even today a kind of cottage industry
among a relatively small band of devotees, many of them members of the
Arthur Machen Society (it did not help that that society suffered an inter-
nal schism in the 1990s, leading to the formation of a competing group,
Friends of Arthur Machen). Aside from Wesley D. Sweetser’s exemplary
but brief monograph, Arthur Machen (1964), for Twayne’s English
Authors Series, and a short biography by Mark Valentine (1995), most of
the critical or scholarly work on Machen has been done in the small press.
But his work continues to be reprinted, and my Penguin Classics edition
of The White People and Other Stories (2011) featured a laudatory preface
by filmmaker Guillermo del Toro.
Dunsany is problematical not because his work is not fantastic from
beginning to end but because his brand of imaginary-world fantasy has
now become a virtually separate subgenre quite different—and inspiring a
very different readership—from that of supernatural horror. The immense
critical and popular esteem of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy
(1954–1955) and its numerous imitators and successors has led to the
rediscovery of earlier work in the same vein that may have influenced
Tolkien, ranging from William Morris to E. R. Eddison; Dunsany is chief
among them. The King of Elfland’s Daughter has come to be seen as the
prototypical fantasy novel, and the current paperback edition contains an
effusive introduction by Neil Gaiman.
Criticism of Dunsany has also been somewhat slow to appear, at least in
academic venues; but in part this has to do with a curious prejudice among
Irish readers and critics against an author who took, as it were, the “wrong”
side in Ireland’s quest for independence from England. As a loyalist who
favored continuing political and cultural ties to England, Dunsany was
virtually drummed out of Irish literature for decades as a kind of literary
traitor. This prejudice now seems to be on the wane, and Dunsany’s work
is being embraced by at least some Irish scholars as a notable contribution
to its national literature as well as a distinctive excursion into the weird.
Blackwood has been perhaps the least studied of the “modern masters,”
perhaps because the sheer extent of his work—13 novels along with more
than 200 short stories and novelettes—makes a comprehensive analysis
difficult. Alone among the Titans, Blackwood’s work has not been exten-
sively reprinted in the decades following his death, with only a few anthol-
ogy chestnuts such as “The Willows” and “The Wendigo” being readily
available. Mike Ashley has been leading a virtually solitary campaign for
Blackwood’s recognition, having compiled an exhaustive bibliography
(1987) along with a detailed and sensitive biography (2001). Some of
Blackwood’s work is now being reprinted, but generally in expensive edi-
tions from small presses.
M. R. James has never lacked for popularity, in part because his work
inspired a small cadre of disciples to write pastiches of his ghost stories.
These disciples—among them E. G. Swain, R. H. Malden, and A. N.
L. Munby—are not sufficiently original to have generated any devotees of
their own; but James, by the mere fact that his work constituted a kind of
culmination of the Victorian ghost story, inspired a more significant group
of writers to evolve the more dynamic subgenre of the psychological ghost
story, where the ghostly manifestations are portrayed as the product of an
aberrant psyche, or at any rate cannot be definitively deemed to be purely
supernatural. Such writers include Oliver Onions, Walter de la Mare, and
L. P. Hartley; several of them are, in my judgment, superior in aesthetic
accomplishment to James himself. But because none of these authors
devoted themselves solely to the weird, and also because some of their
work is a bit rarefied for popular consumption, they have not elicited the
devotion of weird fiction readers and, consequently, not attracted uniform
interest from critics and scholars for their strictly weird work.
But James himself, like Machen and Lovecraft, has been the focus of
attention by a wide array of devotees, chiefly in England. His Collected
Ghost Stories has rarely been out of print in the last 80 or more years, and
such small-press venues as Ghosts & Scholars have done significant scholar-
ship on his life and work. An immense compilation, A Pleasing Terror
(Ash-Tree Press, 2001), included not only the contents of James’s four
original collections of ghost stories but also some fugitive tales as well as
the children’s fantasy The Five Jars (1922). Although now out of print, it
was a landmark publication that exhibited the full range of James’s work
in weird fiction. Two very different biographies, one by Richard Pfaff
(1980) and the other by Michael Cox (1983), focused, respectively, on
168 S. T. JOSHI
James’s scholarly work as an authority on medieval manuscripts and his

work as a writer of ghost stories.
We must also deal with the curious fact that several of these writers—
and many others whom Lovecraft discussed in his essay—are now experi-
encing a revival of critical and popular interest largely because Lovecraft
himself discussed them. Enthusiasm for Lovecraft is today at such a fever
pitch that many readers find themselves attracted both to his predecessors
and to his successors. It is this phenomenon that has led dozens, perhaps
hundreds, of contemporary writers to add to the pseudomythology under-
pinning many of Lovecraft’s tales, now called the Cthulhu Mythos.
Analogously, readers and critics have found consuming interest in the
work of his predecessors and influences—and chief among them (aside
from Poe) are the four Titans discussed here.
On the whole, then, Lovecraft’s judgment regarding the literary supe-
riority of Arthur Machen, Lord Dunsany, Algernon Blackwood, and M. R.
James has been vindicated. The period 1880–1940 has come to be seen as
a kind of “golden age” of weird fiction, and these writers have been rec-
ognized as its leading exponents. They all focused exclusively on the weird;
their fictional work embodied not only a high level of aesthetic achieve-
ment but was a potent expression of the distinct philosophical visions to
which each author ascribed; their influence on subsequent weird fiction
remains vital and significant. The only author missing from this list is
Lovecraft himself, whose own tales in many ways formed a pinnacle of
weird writing and set the stage for much of the best weird fiction to come.
In his humility he would have been the last to believe that he deserved a
place with such an eminent company, but the overwhelming judgment of
readers and critics has emphatically established that he does.
Notes
1. Edmund Wilson, “Tales of the Marvellous and the Ridiculous” (1945), in
H. P. Lovecraft: Four Decades of Criticism, ed. S. T. Joshi (Athens: Ohio
University Press, 1980), 47.
2. Wilson, 48.
3. T. O. Mabbott, Review of The Outsider and Others (American Literature,
March 1940, in A Weird Writer in Our Midst: Early Criticism of H. P.
Lovecraft, ed. S. T. Joshi (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2010), 183.
4. Peter Penzoldt, The Supernatural in Fiction (1952), excerpts in H. P.
Lovecraft: Four Decades of Criticism, 64.
5. H. P. Lovecraft, Letter to Clark Ashton Smith (April 14, 1929); in Selected

Letters 1911–1937, ed. August Derleth, Donald Wandrei, and James
Turner (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1965–76), 2.328.
6. Selected Letters 2.328.
7. Lovecraft, Letter to Frank Belknap Long (June 5, 1923); Selected Letters
1.233–34.
8. Lovecraft, Letter to James F. Morton (October 30, 1929); Selected Letters
3.39.
9. Lovecraft, Letter to Lillian D. Clark (September 29–30, 1924); in Letters
from New York, ed. S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz (San Francisco: Night
Shade, 2005), 63.
10. Lovecraft, Letter to the Gallomo ([April 1920]); in Letters to Alfred
Galpin, ed, S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz (New York: Hippocampus
Press, 2003), 73.
11. Lovecraft, Letter to R. H. Barlow (May 11, 1935); Selected Letters 5.160.
12. Lovecraft, Letter to Lillian D. Clark (December 13, 1925); Letters from
New York 253.
13. Lovecraft, Letter to Lillian D. Clark (January 26, 1926); Letters from
New York 275.
14. Lovecraft, Letter to Bernard Austin Dwyer (1932); Selected Letters 4.4.
15. “Notes on Writing Weird Fiction,” in Collected Essays, ed. S. T. Joshi (New
York: Hippocampus Press, 2004–06), 2.176.
16. Lovecraft, Letter to Elizabeth Toldridge (August 28, 1933); Selected
Letters 4.239.
17. Lovecraft, Letter to August Derleth (March 29, [1934]); in Essential
Solitude: The Letters of H. P. Lovecraft and August Derleth, ed. David
E. Schultz and S. T. Joshi (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2008), 628.
18. Lovecraft, Letter to Fritz Leiber (November 15, 1936); Selected Letters
5.354.
19. S. T. Joshi, Lord Dunsany: Master of the Anglo-Irish Imagination (Westport,
CT: Greenwood Press, 1995), 19.
20. Letter to J. Vernon Shea (September 25, 1933), in Letters to Vernon Shea,
Carl F. Strauch, and Lee McBride White, ed. S. T. Joshi and David
E. Schultz (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2016), 167.
21. See Essential Solitude 764n2.
22. Lovecraft, Letter to J. Vernon Shea (February 5, 1932); Letters to J. Vernon
Shea 90.
23. Lovecraft, Letter to E. Hoffmann Price (August 15, 1934); Selected Letters
5.19.
24. Lovecraft, Letter to Frank Belknap Long (May 20, 1926); Selected Letters
2.53.
170 S. T. JOSHI
25. Lovecraft, Letter to Frank Belknap Long (June 11, 1926); Selected Letters
2.57.
26. Lovecraft, Letter to E. Hoffmann Price (August 15, 1934); Selected Letters
5.19.
Works Cited
Joshi, S.T. 1995. Lord Dunsany: Master of the Anglo-Irish Imagination. Westport:
Greenwood Press.
———., ed. 2010. A Weird Writer in Our Midst: Early Criticism of H. P. Lovecraft.
New York: Hippocampus Press.
Lovecraft, H.P. 1965–76. Selected Letters 1911–1937. Ed. August Derleth, Donald
Wandrei, and James Turner, 5 vols. Sauk City: Arkham House.
———. 2003. Letters to Alfred Galpin. Ed. S.T. Joshi and David E. Schultz.
———. 2004–06. Collected Essays. Ed. S.T. Joshi, 5 vols. New York: Hippocampus
Press.
———. 2005. Letters from New York. Ed. S.T. Joshi and David E. Schultz. San
Francisco: Night Shade.
———. 2008. Essential Solitude: The Letters of H. P. Lovecraft and August Derleth,
2 vols. (numbered consecutively). Ed. David E. Schultz and S.T. Joshi.
———. 2012. The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature. Ed. S.T. Joshi,
2nd ed. New York: Hippocampus Press.
———. 2016. Letters to J. Vernon Shea, Carl F. Strauch, and Lee McBride White.
Ed. S.T. Joshi and David E. Schultz. New York: Hippocampus Press.
Valentine, M. 1995. Arthur Machen. Bridgend, Wales: Seren.
Penzoldt, Peter. 1980. The Supernatural in Fiction. Excerpts in H. P. Lovecraft:
Four Decades of Criticism. Ed. S.T. Joshi, 63–77. Athens: Ohio University
Press.
Wilson, Edmund. 1945. Tales of the Marvellous and the Ridiculous. In H. P.
Lovecraft: Four Decades of Criticism, ed. S.T. Joshi, 46–49. Athens: Ohio
University Press, 1980.
CHAPTER 9
Reception Claims in Supernatural Horror

in Literature and the Course of Weird Fiction
John Glover
The passage of time has been kinder to H. P. Lovecraft’s Supernatural Horror

in Literature (SHL) than to Lovecraft himself, whose elevation to provisional
canonical status in the last decade has been beset with more asterisks, foot-
notes, and disclaimers than any other such recent rise. Critics have tended to
look favorably on the essay, noting variously that it established a structural
pattern followed by many subsequent studies of horror fiction, that it dealt
well with and answered questions about Poe, or that it simply was, in the
words of one of Lovecraft’s most notable detractors, “a really able piece of
work.”1 Perhaps the most negative view thus far came in L. Sprague de
Camp’s 1975 Lovecraft: A Life, where de Camp lamented Lovecraft’s choice
to write the essay rather than a novel or another story. While de Camp’s bio-
graphical study has since been eclipsed by S. T. Joshi’s biographies, it contin-
ues to fascinate as an exemplar of all that is poorly considered in Lovecraft
Studies. As such, it is no surprise that de Camp declared the essay “a compila-
tion of the sort that any professor of English literature could do,” though de
Camp is not alone in having questioned Lovecraft’s judgment in writing at
length for a publication with extremely limited distribution.2
J. Glover (*)
VCU Libraries, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA, USA

172 J. GLOVER
SHL is the product of an outsider who viewed the ability to compre-

hend the most excellent in supernatural horror as the faculty of a particular
sort of reader: sensitive, discerning, and fundamentally apart from society.
This claim that only certain readers—or certain kinds of reading—could
provide access to higher spheres of literary appreciation has echoed down
through the years among writers and critics of weird fiction. Whether in
the publishing history of speculative fiction or in the ongoing struggle to
define contemporary weird fiction, Lovecraft’s views on the special nature
of weird fiction are still alive and well.
The quest for authenticity—in readership, in fiction—is beset with
problems, but a desire for authenticity is hardly unique to weird fiction.
The problems associated with such quests have been well studied, from
fundamentally colonial desires to trading in authenticity for commercial
reasons. That the fiction of a man like Lovecraft should have authentic
appeal to an audience increasingly diverse in ethnicity, sexuality, gender,
and all other forms of identity is occasionally surprising to some, but it
makes sense in light of the alienation—of the outsideness—that so thor-
oughly informs his writings, up to and including the aesthetics embedded
in SHL. This essay, first published in an amateur magazine and seeing only
a tiny fraction of the audience that his stories saw in the pulps, encapsu-
lates the views that Lovecraft held which dictated the terms of weird fic-
tion’s reception for more than half a century.
The Soundest Readers

SHL surveys the genre up to Lovecraft’s time, with special attention paid
to the historical development of the field. Lovecraft treats the rise of the
Gothic, the landmark impact of Poe, the mastery he sees in Hodgson,
Machen, Blackwood, and so on, as well as briefer mentions along the way
of scores of other authors and works. All of this is expected in a survey
work, as are Lovecraft’s repeated critical judgments, identifying those
works which he feels stand at the top of the field. The processes of critically
judging and of setting the limitations of his study create areas and works
that he sees as being of lower quality, outside his remit, or both. His judg-
ments are made on subjective aesthetic grounds, adhering to “cosmic
vision.”3 Along with all of this, however, come statements about the capac-
ities, tastes, and traits of those readers who can appreciate to the greatest
degree the best of supernatural horror: the “true weird tale” (28).4
RECEPTION CLAIMS IN SUPERNATURAL HORROR IN LITERATURE… 173
At the outset, Lovecraft is keen to set his genre apart from then-
ascendant Modernism and plain-spoken tales of ordinary life, claiming
that “the appeal of the spectrally macabre is generally narrow because it
demands from the reader a certain degree of imagination and a capacity
for detachment from every-day life” [emphasis added] (25). This is only
the first of the essay’s claims that weird fiction is a special genre for special
readers.5 The roots of these claims are not terribly important to the ques-
tion of reception, whether they lay in Lovecraft’s well-documented inter-
est in (cultural, intellectual, racial) elites, a sense of inferiority arising from
his social isolation or insufficiency of formal schooling, or the under-
whelming compensation he received for his own fiction, whether in the
form of payment or favorable critical notice. They serve to identify the
traits of the people whom Lovecraft believes are the best audience for
“true” weird fiction.
Lovecraft claimed in SHL that “[t]he one test of the really weird is
simply this—whether or not there be excited in the reader a profound
sense of dread, and of contact with unknown spheres and powers; a subtle
attitude of awed listening, as if for the beating of black wings or the
scratching of outside shapes and entities on the known universe’s utmost
rim” (28). The signs by which one can locate the best in supernatural hor-
ror are not to be found in the work itself, but in the reader. If the weird is
located more clearly among fellow readers than in works, then it would
seem that the nature of a work’s reception is the final answer to the ques-
tion of whether a work fits Lovecraft’s definition.
In discussing the early Gothic novel, Lovecraft speaks of the hunger for
cosmic horror that drove even “the soundest readers” to seek out weak
fiction that was the closest thing they could get to the truly weird (34).
Here Lovecraft assumes that shared reading experiences sprang from natu-
ral affinity and a shared longing for something not yet known to them.
While not unreasonable, it would be stretching a point to describe hunger
for the truly weird as the driving force for all readers of the Gothic, but
that is not actually what Lovecraft does. Instead, he implies that even the
best of readers, conditioned to receive the best fiction, would lower them-
selves as far as necessary to get a taste of what they actually wanted.
Arthur Machen’s “The Great God Pan” comes in for the comment by
Lovecraft that a “sensitive reader” will reach the work’s conclusion with
“only an appreciative shudder” and a sensation duplicating that of one of
the characters, that the story is too much to believe, else one think the
world a nightmare (83). While this is not about the nature of weird fiction
174 J. GLOVER
per se, it seems to speak to the idea of the discernment of the best readers,
coupled with comments about melodrama and excessive coincidence. If
nothing else, it suggests that Lovecraft believed the dedicated reader of
weird fiction, much as with the Gothic example, seeks out the taste of the
truly weird regardless of flaws in the material that nurtures it.
Perhaps fittingly it is at the end of the essay that Lovecraft uses the
phrase that most clearly states his feelings about the reader of “the spec-
tral” in literature: it will appeal primarily to those with “keen special sensi-
bilities” (96). The appeal of supernatural horror is strongest for those
Lovecraft sees as characterized by unusual perception, all the better to
apprehend that profound sense of dread he identified early on as charac-
terizing the truly weird.
What is going on here? Perhaps one might say that Lovecraft’s style was
discursive, in every genre in which he wrote, and so one might be tempted
to identify these comments as no more than authorial asides. If that were
the case, however, why the consistency? Read separately, Lovecraft’s asides
are merely that: obiter dicta, rhetorical fillips that can be enjoyed (or not)
while following his articulation of the history of supernatural horror.
Indeed, presumably this volume would not exist without enduring interest
in Lovecraft the critic, whether we concur with his aesthetic judgments or
not. These reception claims, however, are not coming from an obscure
figure in the history of supernatural horror but from arguably the most
influential US practitioner of weird fiction to date. Further, they are inex-
tricably linked with his most nuanced articulation of his own personal
philosophy when it came to his chosen subject matter.
The fact that SHL was first published by W. Paul Cook in the first issue
of his The Recluse, a short-lived magazine that was circulated among ama-
teurs, suggests one possible answer: that Lovecraft is embedding in his
discussion of the genre the kind of language commonly associated with
fans and fandom. While science fiction fandom was nascent in 1927, the
year of the essay’s first publication, Sherlock Holmes fandom was many
decades old by that point, and certainly Lovecraft had spent time around
fans and enthusiasts, whether at amateur journalism conventions or via the
letters columns of the pulps, including Weird Tales, notable for the sense
of fraternity shared by its readers.6 Sam Moskowitz, ur-fan and historian of
fandom, summarized the thinking that might lie behind this reading thus:
Followers and glorifiers of the fantastic tale like to think that they are differ-
ent, that they represent something new on the face of the earth; mutants
born with an intelligence and a sense of farseeing appreciation just a bit

higher than the norm. They like to believe that their counterpart has never
before existed, that they have no predecessors. “No one,” they say, “has ever
seen our visions, dreamed our dreams. Never before has man’s brain reached
out so far into the limitless stretches of the cosmos about him.”7
This sounds not dissimilar from Lovecraft’s statements, but he and

Moskowitz have different concerns. Moskowitz’s work is about the struc-
turing of organized appreciation, communication networks, conventions,
and other formal elements of fandom. The closest Lovecraft comes to any
of that in SHL is his treatment of sub-par examples of the Gothic novel as
highly imitative, perhaps bordering on proto-fan fiction (34). That said,
SHL is not, for lack of a better word, fannish; it is critical, offering pene-
trating judgment on the range of supernatural horror. Lovecraft’s call to
special sensitivity comes in tandem with discussions of what makes for the
best of supernatural horror, standing head and shoulders above the rest. If
these statements are designed in some way to encourage fandom writ large
and promote group cohesion, they are curiously elitist and directed to a
distinct subset of the people who might actually be receptive to his claims.
More than occasional authorial asides, and more than mere by-products
of fan locution, I believe that together such statements about the reader of
weird fiction can be read as a kind of crypto-manifesto, calling out to
Lovecraft’s perceived compatriots. The identification of traits that might
appeal to readers at the more literary end of the supernatural horror spec-
trum is an implicit acknowledgment of the group’s nature as a kind of
secret society within the already semi-walled garden of dedicated readers
of supernatural horror, a phenomenon James Machin has explored at
length in studying connoisseurship in weird fiction communities.8 At the
same time, Lovecraft’s claims hint at recognition among the elect of some-
thing that is already there, waiting to be uncovered in the hands of skilled
writers.
Publishing Outsiders
The months and years following Lovecraft’s death were ones of grief for
the loss of one who had given of himself freely to friends and colleagues.
Soon enough, however, some of his associates aspired to publish Lovecraft
in the style which they felt he deserved. The story of August Derleth and
Donald Wandrei’s foundation of Arkham House Press is told elsewhere in
176 J. GLOVER
many places: the attempts to find a mainstream publisher, a brief period of

rejections, the foundation of a specialty press with the express purpose of
publishing Lovecraft in hard covers. What is most interesting as it pertains
to Lovecraft’s views on the special nature of weird fiction is how quickly
Derleth and Wandrei turned from mainstream possibilities to the idea of
founding their own press. As the first major specialty publisher of genre
fiction, Arkham House paved the way for the growth of a market apart
from the mainstream and thereby able to focus on works that were,
depending on one’s perspective, either of less appeal to the general market
or best appreciated by those with the necessary inclinations to receive the
best of supernatural horror.
Whether the eager championing of Lovecraft’s work by his contempo-
raries in the years after his death was better or worse for his oeuvre is
impossible to say, but it is possible to trace the perpetuation of the weird
tale. Tales were reprinted in anthologies that found broad audiences, and
Lovecraft’s work saw republication by Panther, Del Rey, and so on.
However, new publications in the style championed by Lovecraft were
most commonly produced by presses like Arkham House, Donald
M. Grant, or Fedogan & Bremer. While fiction having something or other
to do with the Weird has spread far beyond these confines, there continues
to exist a thriving niche for fiction explicitly written in the Lovecraftian
mode.
At the same time as publication of weird fiction often remained the
province of small presses and small magazines, so, too, did the scholarship.
Starting in the late 1970s, critics conducted conversation in small journals
devoted to Lovecraft or weird fiction apart from the mainstream of US
literary criticism, often ignoring trends in the field and confining their
bibliographies to primary sources and to secondary material from other
similarly focused journals. While there was indeed criticism of weird fiction
ongoing, continuing the kind of study Lovecraft carried out in SHL, it
remained unseen and largely untapped by a wider audience.
Lovecraft Studies, for instance, was indexed by the MLA International
Bibliography, but other publications did not receive the same attention.
They often were not acquired (or, if acquired, retained) by research librar-
ies, apart from those with substantial holdings associated with Lovecraft,
such as Brown University. This has meant that their discourse is currently
out of easy reach for many contemporary critics, and has lessened their
impact on succeeding generations of scholars, who work in an age when
peer-reviewed literary scholarship can be accessed with the click of a but-
ton via full-text databases and similar tools.9 In recent years, criticism of
supernatural horror generally has reached wider audiences and been of
interest to a larger number of critics, fueled by everything from the rise of
horror in other media to the rise of cultural studies, comparative literature,
and so on.
Cracks in the Shell

The 1980s were a busy time for the genre of supernatural horror, as
authors like Stephen King and Anne Rice conquered the New York Times
bestseller lists, and bookstores were full of horror novels, collections, and
anthologies. Much of this fiction rode the family-defending, monster-
destroying coattails of Stephen King and William Peter Blatty, back to
Dracula and beyond. Along with the bestsellers and healthy midlist, there
was also a thriving small press community. In these began to appear some
authors interested in taking the cosmic horror espoused by Lovecraft and
minimizing or stripping it of the trappings he used. Perhaps the most
notable of this group was Thomas Ligotti. Starting in the very early 1980s,
he wrote fiction informed by a plethora of authors—Thomas Bernhard,
Franz Kafka, Vladimir Nabokov, Bruno Schulz, and others—well outside
the stream stretching back through Arkham House to Weird Tales and to
the sources identified by Lovecraft in SHL.10 Ligotti has in the decades
since reached wider audiences through reprint editions and influence on
other authors, but he has himself remained something of a niche author,
likely due to the heavy streak of undiluted nihilism that runs through his
work. As Lovecraft called to weird fiction aficionados through appeals to
their sensibilities, so, too, does Ligotti implicitly call to those with narrow
sensibilities. His terror of the universe can be called nothing but “cosmic
horror,” yet it largely lacks the by-now clichéd tentacles, books of lore,
and maddened antiquarians that signaled “mainstream” weird fiction for
much of the twentieth century.
It should not be overlooked that the tropes of Lovecraft’s fiction were
reflections of his ideas about the world, and the associations he had, in
particular his intellectual championing of Anglo-American tradition, edu-
cation, aristocracy, and whiteness. While these elements do not come in
for discussion as merits unto themselves in SHL, it is difficult to read it and
think other than that Lovecraft’s envisioned reader looked as he imagined
the world should look. It seems worth pointing out in this context that, as
the US has changed, so, too, has the US readership for weird fiction. The
178 J. GLOVER
critics, filmmakers, editors, anthologists, writers, and readers who work in

the genre represent a diverse spectrum of humanity, from race to class to
gender and beyond. As Nick Mamatas, a US author, editor, and antholo-
gist of Greek descent, wrote in a pertinent essay, “[w]e read Lovecraft’s
work and write Lovecraftian fiction, but we don’t side with his sallow
protagonists and their nervous fits—we see ourselves in the glory of the
Outsider Things.”11 This stripe of weird fiction, transposing insider and
outsider, shows no sign in fading in popularity, and it appears to appeal to
readers of many kinds. Perhaps, as Kurt Fawver has argued, it is precisely
the fluid boundaries between self and other, perennially in flux in weird
fiction, that attract a globalized, interconnected readership to contempo-
rary weird fiction.12
At the same time as weird fiction was finding new and ever more diverse
champions, it was also sidling slowly but surely into the ivory tower. Much
academic study of weird fiction has been carried out according to the con-
ventions that obtain elsewhere in literary studies, from postcolonial stud-
ies to Marxist analysis, and comment on the strangeness of Lovecraft’s
transition into respectability as an object of study has been louder in the
news or in the online scrum of conversations among fans and readers than
among academics. Lovecraft’s entry into the mainstream of US literature
is marked as clearly as anything by the 2005 publication of the Library of
America edition of his works, H. P. Lovecraft: Tales, an honor bestowed on
no other writer of weird fiction aside from Shirley Jackson. This canoniza-
tion at once replicates the exclusivity that Lovecraft propagated with
regard to weird fiction and utterly demolishes it. Even given the flexibility
of the postmodern canon, and specifically the opening of the Library of
America in the mid-2000s, to authors and genres historically ignored by
the academic literary establishment, canonization marks universal impor-
tance and applicability like nothing else.13 Far from work reserved for
those with “keen special sensibilities,” the stories of America’s premier
author of weird fiction have received the stamp of the ultimate insider.
The Troubling of Consensus

Despite the above-discussed strains, it would still have been possible in the
early years of the new millennium to claim that weird fiction generally
looked a certain way and that Lovecraft’s formulations still held sway in
how readers, writers, and critics approached the genre. The m
uch-discussed
movement/moment of the late 1990s and early 2000s known as the “New
Weird” could be written off as a blip in the development of the field, per-
haps more broadly about fantasy than specifically the tradition of weird
fiction, and even participants in the movement questioned whether it
actually existed.14 Academic consideration of Lovecraft, to say nothing of
lesser-known authors of weird fiction, could be ignored by the majority of
readers and writers in the field. Most of the work of newer writers in the
tradition, from Thomas Ligotti to Caitlín R. Kiernan, could still be
squeezed fitfully into a box of the approximate dimensions described by
Lovecraft.
All of this was to change with the 2011 publication of Ann and Jeff
VanderMeer’s The Weird, an anthology treating weird fiction at previously
unseen breadth and depth. Importantly for the kind of reception that
Lovecraft deemed essential to weird fiction, The Weird was in essence an
argument against the idea of the weird tale as a subset of supernatural hor-
ror, but rather as a manifold tradition in its own right that could be found
in literatures around the world. In their introduction, the VanderMeers
offer a definition that attempts to bridge some of the gaps between the
wide varieties of works that they assembled:
Because The Weird often exists in the interstices, because it can occupy dif-
ferent territories simultaneously, an impulse exists among the more rigid
taxonomists to find The Weird suspect, to argue it should not, cannot be,
separated out from other traditions. Because the Weird is as much a sensa-
tion as it is a mode of writing, the most keenly attuned amongst us will say
‘I know it when I see it,’ by which they mean ‘I know it when I feel it’—and
this, too, the more rigorous of categorizing taxidermists will take to mean
The Weird does not exist when, in fact, this is one of the more compelling
arguments for its existence.15
The idea of defining weird fiction as something far-ranging, known by

feel, and living interstitially should make sense to any reader, and it seems
an excellent rubric for assembling an anthology. If elements like diction,
structure, plot, characterization, and so on are not the important criteria
for identifying weird fiction, though, then what is? For Lovecraft, the true
test was “whether or not there be excited in the reader a profound sense
of dread, and of contact with unknown spheres and powers; a subtle atti-
tude of awed listening, as if for the beating of black wings or the scratching
of outside shapes and entities on the known universe’s utmost rim” (28).
From one definition that can only be checked internally by the reader, we
180 J. GLOVER
pass to another that can likewise only be checked internally by the reader—
either of which renders taxonomical discussion difficult, if not impossible.
As such, I offer the suggestion that weird fiction is an emergent mode of
fiction writing, identifiable purely by the sense of cosmic uncertainty that
it evokes in the reader. The causes of this uncertainty necessarily must shift
from reader to reader, culture to culture, and age to age, rendering ulti-
mately futile any attempt to define weird fiction as a genre based in objec-
tive criteria. If it can be pinned to an objective criterion, from Lovecraft
onward it comes down to an inherently unstable one: “[a]tmosphere is the
all-important thing, for the final criterion of authenticity is not the dove-
tailing of a plot but the creation of a given sensation” (28).
The argument for breadth that the VanderMeers made in The Weird
about the nature of weird fiction did not emerge from nowhere. Between
the two of them, they have an extensive background in writing, reviewing,
publishing, editing, or anthologizing fiction across the spectrum of the
fantastic. As Jeff VanderMeer’s participation in the New Weird linked his
own fiction to the larger tradition, so did Ann VanderMeer’s editorial his-
tory lay the groundwork for her view of weird fiction. From 1989 to 2002,
she published The Silver Web, known as The Sterling Web for its first six
issues, which its tagline described as “A Magazine of the Surreal.” She
published there a broad range of fantastic fiction from authors of diverse
backgrounds and styles, long before that was widely considered an ideal in
the speculative fiction community. Her editorial work has continued in
various venues and anthologies, and is ongoing, but perhaps most inter-
esting for this study is her time at Weird Tales.
From 2007 to 2011, Ann VanderMeer served as Weird Tales’ fiction
editor, selecting works that were largely in a new direction stylistically
from those chosen by (in various combinations) George Scithers, John
Gregory Betancourt, and Darrell Schweitzer, who ran the publication
from the start of the revival that began in 1988 and has not yet officially
ended as of this writing. Her approach was not consistently welcomed by
all readers, some of whom found her taste radical, or too far afield from
the fictions of Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Sheridan Le Fanu, and other
authors from the magazine’s heyday, but the winds of change were evident
in 2009 when she, together with editorial and creative director Stephen
Segal, won the Hugo Award for Best Semiprozine for their Weird Tales
work. Two years later the publisher sold the magazine, setting in motion
many changes, with VanderMeer ultimately resigning due to “major artis-
tic and philosophical differences with the existing editors.”16
Ann VanderMeer’s editorship at Weird Tales was revolutionary. She

directed attention toward figures often wholly outside the realm of tradi-
tional weird fiction as identified by Lovecraft. Likewise, it is difficult to see
the publisher’s stated intent of making their first post-VanderMeer issue
“Cthulhu-themed” as anything other than a counterrevolutionary action
intended to shore up the identity of a magazine core to “traditional” weird
fiction, which had published much of the by-now-antiquarian stripe of
weird fiction for the preponderance of its revival run. The distinction here
is stark: Ann VanderMeer chose stories that fit her ethos, aiming to publish
fiction that would genuinely disquiet. Her successors chose to return to
fiction characterized by tropes that have been commodified to the point of
losing meaningful association with the cosmic horror actually espoused by
Lovecraft. At this point, some authors who regularly or occasionally pub-
lish work that could be classified as weird fiction actually avoid the label,
or labels generally, and many are content to leave taxonomy to the
critics.17
An even more recent iteration in the conflict between visions of the best
in supernatural horror—who should enjoy it, who should write it, who
should read it—came to a head on November 8, 2015. At the World
Fantasy Awards ceremony held in Saratoga Springs, New York, it was
announced after a year of debate that the form of the World Fantasy Award
was to change from that of a statuette bearing Lovecraft’s visage to another
subject, yet to be determined as of this writing, and debate on the issue is
ongoing. To consider the design of an award in the context of an analysis
of Lovecraft’s greatest work of non-fiction may seem beside the point, but
consider that the World Fantasy Awards are given in association with the
World Fantasy Convention, the first of which was held in Providence in
1975 with the intention of reviving interest in Lovecraft and other authors
of his generation. The award was founded in one spirit, but it has since
been changed in order to accommodate the broader field of fantastic
endeavor, for which Lovecraft was no longer felt to be a suitable represen-
tative, which inevitably raises various specters. The most notable objec-
tions arose on account of Lovecraft’s well-documented racism, xenophobia,
and anti-Semitism, which became subjects of increasingly acrimonious
debate in many venues before and after the award change.18
Whether qualms about Lovecraft’s face representing a major award in
the genre of fantasy are well-founded or not,19 whatever the intentions of
those who campaigned for a change in the award and however much they
may respect the works of Lovecraft, it is impossible to read this change as
182 J. GLOVER
other than a rebuke to Lovecraft. Whether this is aimed at “traditional”

weird fiction or at Lovecraft’s ideas about it, there is no evidence that the
kind of vitriolic fights that arose in this debate occurred within the frater-
nity of weird fiction in Lovecraft’s lifetime. The field was more demo-
graphically homogeneous then, and the same shared outlook on and
experiences of reading supernatural horror built a camaraderie that more
easily overruled disagreements.
Despite or because of these shifts in weird fiction, there is enough inter-
est in it at this point to support an annual summation anthology, in the style
of other genres’ “year’s bests,” with rotating volume editors. The first vol-
ume of Undertow Publications’ Year’s Best Weird Fiction appeared in 2014,
with the series edited by publisher Michael Kelly and the initial volume
edited by author Laird Barron. True to the genre’s origins, the stories
included are drawn largely from fantasy and horror publications, with a
smattering from markets closer to the literary mainstream. Even so, both
editors acknowledge explicitly the situation of the weird at this time, and
the multiplicity of visions that now are identified as belonging to the tradi-
tion. Barron’s introduction, full of mentions of supernatural horror icons
like Blackwood and Jackson, dilates on this, acknowledging that the weird
is inherently difficult to define, and perhaps as a result reading for the
anthology was a formidable task that covered a broad territory, even with
Kelly having taken a first pass through submissions to pre-screen contents.20
This is a far cry from the decades when weird fiction was thought to live
primarily in specialty publications conforming to Lovecraft’s rubric, and
was identified almost exclusively with supernatural horror.
Commodification, Slippage, and the Erosion

of Meaning
Even as Lovecraft’s passage into the canon has practically guaranteed dis-
semination of his work beyond the dedicated readership of weird fiction,
the interconnected stories that he wrote have been repurposed and com-
modified by authors, artists, game designers, musicians, and moviemakers,
diluting the very qualities that Lovecraft valued most and tried to embed
in his work. There is no need to trace this in much detail, given the careful
attention that Mark Jones has paid to the process,21 and the subject has
called to scholars to the extent that a number of monographs have treated
the legacy of Lovecraft and his work, from Joshi’s 2008 The Rise and Fall
of the Cthulhu Mythos (revised, expanded, and retitled for 2015 publica-
tion) to W. Scott Poole’s 2016 In the Mountains of Madness: The Life and
Extraordinary Afterlife of H. P. Lovecraft.22
The spreading impact of Lovecraft and his creations has been noted in
recent press coverage of ongoing debates over Lovecraft’s legacy, along
with the extent to which the trappings of his stories have been grafted
onto all manner of consumer goods, including “[b]oard Games. Coins.
Corsets. Christmas wreaths. Dice. Dresses. Keychains. License-plate
frames. Mugs. Phone cases. Plush toys. Posters. Ties.”23 While these com-
modities have little or nothing to do with Lovecraft’s vision for a rarified
version of supernatural horror, and everything to do with the discrete
trappings of the “Cthulhu Mythos,” one does not exist without the other.
As Joshi observed in H. P. Lovecraft: A Life, the course of Lovecraft’s early
cultural and literary afterlife was determined largely by August Derleth,
and that meant “Mythos” above all.24
The shifting of the definition of “weird fiction,” sometimes moving
quite far away from Lovecraft’s vision of cosmic horror, has proven an
attraction for authors, publishers, and readers who see the descriptor as a
useful tool. This appeal has led in some quarters to a slippage that threat-
ens to remove entirely any descriptive value the term may hold, even when
it comes to describing the fictions that, at this particular time and place,
evoke cosmic uncertainty. On Goodreads, for instance, a website that
allows readers to review, catalogue, and discuss books, “weird fiction” is
used as a descriptor for many authors traditionally included in the defini-
tion, from Lovecraft to Algernon Blackwood, as well as newer entries into
the field, like China Miéville or Caitlín R. Kiernan. It is also used to iden-
tify a wide range of works by authors who do not self-describe as writers
of weird fiction, are not published by publishers who identify as publishing
weird fiction, and who do not seem to pass either the most generous kinds
of definitions, as offered by the VanderMeers in their introduction to The
Weird, or to resemble formally, thematically, or otherwise the bulk of
other novels and stories that have up until recently constituted the field of
weird fiction. While the internet is nothing if not anarchic, the range of
material currently described as “weird fiction” has transitioned from the
confines of Lovecraft’s description, through the catholic range of New
Weird and The Weird, into something that seems less coherent, or even
meaningful. As publications, publishers, and reviewers are coming to use
the phrase “weird fiction” to describe works resting practically anyplace on
the border between realistic and fantastical modes of writing, it is easy to
184 J. GLOVER
imagine a range of futures for the signifier after its complete separation
from the (formerly) signified.
It should come as no surprise, then, after all of this evolution, that there
even exists a genre of online mashup blending Lovecraftian motifs with
characters from Charles Schulz’s internationally beloved Peanuts comic
strips. (To call this kind of combination utterly tone deaf would perhaps
seem too harsh, insofar as Schulz’s comic strip often delved into the depths
of the human soul, particularly in the earlier decades of its run, but this
tenor softened as Schulz aged.25) This is, however, something so far out-
side the scope of anything Lovecraft would consider the remit of weird
fiction that it beggars the imagination, particularly given Lovecraft’s view
that humor undercuts the “true sense of the morbidly unnatural” (28).
Despite the well-known commodification of Schulz’ intellectual prop-
erty, he repeatedly asserted its (and his) fundamental integrity, springing
from his control over the comics, regardless of developments in other
iterations of his work.26 Lovecraft, while generous in life and allowing oth-
ers to make free use of his concepts and mythos, cordially detested com-
mercialism, and it seems unlikely that he would have countenanced use of
his work in ways that so clearly run counter to his philosophy, intentions
in creating it, or ideas about what is appropriate in the best of supernatural
horror. That the murky legal status of his works, many unquestionably
public domain and the identity of potential rights-holders unclear for oth-
ers, enables such combination is irony stretched to the breaking point, as
is the idea that a greater number of people are now more familiar with the
derivative, transmediated ghosts of weird fiction than their potent source
material. Far from a cloistered subgenre of supernatural horror appreci-
ated only by those with elevated sensibilities, weird fiction now encom-
passes a profusion of different aesthetics and narrative modes, from retiring
New Englanders driven mad by knowledge of humanity’s cosmic irrele-
vance to the antics of America’s laughable, lovable loser, with tentacles.
Acknowledgments I am grateful for Sean Moreland’s collegiality at ICFA 36,

invitation to this volume, and patience as I completed this chapter. Selena
Chambers was my cheerleader and supporter, listening for hours as I maundered
about the formation of the field of weird fiction. Conversations with Ann and Jeff
VanderMeer helped my thinking about publishing networks and ecosystems. I am
grateful for the support of VCU Libraries colleagues past and present, in particular
Dennis Clark, Bettina Peacemaker, and Sara Williams. Finally, I am grateful to Kyla
Tew for her patience, love, and encouragement as I have sought to write every-
thing that I want to write.
Notes
1. Carroll, Noël, The Philosophy of Horror, Or, Paradoxes of the Heart (New
York: Routledge, 1990), 239; Joshi, S. T., H. P. Lovecraft: A Life, (West
Warwick, RI: Necronomicon Press, 1996), 383; Wilson, Edmund, Literary
Essays and Reviews of the 1930s & 40s, (New York: Library of America,
2007), 702.
2. De Camp, L. Sprague, Lovecraft: A Biography, (Garden City, NY:
Doubleday, 1975), 247; Bleiler, E. F., “Introduction to the Dover
Edition,” Supernatural Horror in Literature, by H. P. Lovecraft (New
York: Dover Publications, 1973), iii.
3. Bleiler, E. F., “Introduction to the Dover Edition,” Supernatural Horror
in Literature, by H. P. Lovecraft (New York: Dover Publications, 1973), vi.
4. Page number references are to Lovecraft, H. P. The Annotated Supernatural
Horror in Literature, commentary by S. T. Joshi, 2nd ed. (New York:
Hippocampus Press, 2012).
5. For discussion of Lovecraft’s repudiation of mundanity, see Nyikos, Dániel,
“The Lovecraft Circle and the ‘Weird Class’: ‘Against the Complacency of
an Orthodox Sun-Dweller,’” in The Unique Legacy of Weird Tales: The
Evolution of Modern Fantasy and Horror, ed. Justin Everett and Jeffrey
H. Shanks (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield), 36–37. Readers’ recep-
tivity to this idea is less important for Nyikos than their overall rejection of
daily life and consequent openness to Lovecraft’s “truly weird.”
6. Bleiler, E. F., “Introduction to the Dover Edition,” Supernatural Horror in
Literature, by H. P. Lovecraft (New York: Dover Publications, 1973), vii.
7. Moskowitz, Sam, The Immortal Storm: A History of Science Fiction Fandom
(Westport, CT: Hyperion Press, 1974), 1.
8. Machin, James, “Weird Fiction and the Virtues of Obscurity: Machen,
Stenbock, and the Weird Connoisseurs,” Textual Practice 31, no. 6
(October 2017): 1065 and passim, doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/09502
36X.2017.1358692
9. Those interested in accessing the full history of Lovecraft publication and
criticism, including works from this period, should seek out Joshi, S. T.,
H. P. Lovecraft: A Comprehensive Bibliography (Tampa, FL: University of
Tampa Press, 2009).
10. Angerhuber, E.M. and Thomas Wagner, “Disillusionment Can Be
Glamorous: An Interview with Thomas Ligotti,” in The Thomas Ligotti
Reader, ed. Darrell Schweitzer (Holicong, PA: Wildside Press, 2003),
53–54.
11. Mamatas, Nick, “Why Write Lovecraftian Fiction?” SF Signal, November
18, 2014, http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2014/11/guest-post-nick-
mamatas-asks-why-write-lovecraftian-fiction/.
186 J. GLOVER
12. Fawver, Kurt, “Why Weird, Why Now? On the Rationale for Weird
Fiction’s Resurgence,” Thinking Horror 1 (2015): 149.
13. Hantke, Steffen, “From the Library of America to the Mountains of
Madness: Recent Discourse on H. P. Lovecraft,” in New Critical Essays on
H. P. Lovecraft, ed. David Simmons and S. T. Joshi (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2013), 139.
14. VanderMeer, Jeff. “The New Weird: ‘It’s Alive?’” in The New Weird, ed.
Ann VanderMeer and Jeff VanderMeer (San Francisco: Tachyon
Publications, 2008), xiii.
15. VanderMeer, Ann, and Jeff VanderMeer, The Weird: A Compendium of
Strange and Dark Stories (New York: Tor Books, 2012), xvi.
16. VanderMeer, Jeff, “Weird Tales, Ann VanderMeer, and Utter Stupidity,”
The Southern Reach, August 20, 2012, http://www.jeffvandermeer.
com/2012/08/20/weird-tales-ann-vandermeer-and-utter-stupidity/
17. Stephen Graham Jones, e-mail message to the author, December 2, 2015.
Molly Tanzer, e-mail message to author, November 6, 2015.
18. Cruz, Lenika, “‘Political Correctness’ Won’t Ruin H. P. Lovecraft’s
Legacy,” The Atlantic, November 12, 2015, https://www.theatlantic.
com/entertainment/archive/2015/11/hp-lovecraft-world-fantasy-
awards/415485/; Erikson, Steven, “‘Awards or Bust’ Guest Blog,” The
Critical Dragon, November 14, 2015, https://thecriticaldragon.
com/2015/11/14/awards-or-bust-guest-blog-by-steven-erikson/;
Flood, Alison, “HP Lovecraft Biographer Rages Against Ditching of Author
as Fantasy Prize Emblem,” Guardian US, November 11, 2015, https://
www.theguardian.com/books/2015/nov/11/hp-lovecraft-biographer-
rages-against-ditching-of-author-as-fantasy-prize-emblem; Kiernan, Caitlín
R., “I have seen what the darkness does,” The Online Journal of Caitlín
R. Kiernan, November 11, 2015, http://greygirlbeast.livejournal.
com/2015/11/11/; VanderMeer, Jeff, “Moving Past Lovecraft,” Weird
Fiction Review, September 1, 2012, http://weirdfictionreview.
com/2012/09/moving-past-lovecraft/; Wiggins, Troy L., “On the
Shelving of HP Lovecraft’s Image,” Book Riot, November 16, 2015,
http://bookriot.com/2015/11/16/shelving-hp-lovecrafts-image/.
19. I believe that they were and are, given the field’s constitution in the twenty-
first century, however much I personally appreciate the Gahan Wilson-
sculpted likeness of Lovecraft. While the award has meant many things to
many people in its 40-plus years, it has since come to signify e xcellence in
many areas of fantasy. Lovecraft’s star has risen far enough that the removal
of his likeness from the award does him no damage, and may do much
good in terms of broadening the field.
20. Barron, Laird, “We Are for the Weird,” in Year’s Best Weird Fiction, vol. 1.,
ed. Laird Barron and Michael Kelly (Pickering, ON: Undertow
Publications, 2014), 15.
21. Jones, Mark, “Tentacles and Teeth: The Lovecraftian being in Popular
Culture,” in New Critical Essays on H. P. Lovecraft, edited by David
Simmons and S. T. Joshi (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013),
228–230.
22. Joshi, S. T., The Rise, Fall, and Rise of the Cthulhu Mythos (New York:
Hippocampus Press, 2015); Poole, W. Scott, In the Mountains of Madness:
The Life and Extraordinary Afterlife of H. P. Lovecraft (Berkeley, CA: Soft
Skull Press, 2016).
23. Eil, Philip, “The Unlikely Reanimation of H. P. Lovecraft,” The Atlantic
August 20, 2015, https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/
2015/08/hp-lovecraft-125/401471/.
24. Joshi, S. T., H. P. Lovecraft: A Life, (West Warwick, RI: Necronomicon
Press, 1996), 645–646.
25. Groth, Gary, “SCHULZ: At 3 O’Clock in the Morning,” The Comics
Journal 200 (1997), 230.
26. Groth, Gary, “SCHULZ: At 3 O’Clock in the Morning,” The Comics
Journal 200 (1997), 259.
SECTION III
“The True Weird”: (Re)Defining

the Weird
CHAPTER 10
Bizarre Epistemology, Bizarre Subject:

A Definition of Weird Fiction
Michael Cisco
There are a number of points that Lovecraft raises in Supernatural Horror

in Literature (1927; hereafter SHL) which, when extended and devel-
oped, can help us arrive at a clearer definition of weird fiction. This defini-
tion will unfold along two fronts: one epistemological, the other having to
do with the idea of the subject. By confronting readers with the infinity of
experience itself, weird fiction gives us a bizarre epistemology and a bizarre
subject.
Right away, it is apparent that there is a particular challenge involved in
this task; it will require close attention to differentiate between philosoph-
ical extrapolations and aesthetic tendencies, or in other words, to look at
weird fiction from a philosophical point of view without turning weird
fiction, which is an art, into a philosophy. In some instances, philosophical
ideas will affect the aesthetics of weird fiction, while in others, weird fic-
tion will point toward certain philosophical ideas, perhaps in anticipation
of their historical development in philosophy proper. In looking at
Lovecraft’s essay, it is already necessary to watch closely the division
between his theory and his practice, to keep the domains distinct, espe-
M. Cisco (*)
English, CUNY Hostos, Bronx, NY, USA

192 M. CISCO
cially because they are closely connected, Lovecraft having been a peculiarly
rigorous and consistent theorist of his own fiction. “Naturally we cannot
expect all weird tales to conform absolutely to any theoretical model.”1
In working out his own partial definition of the genre, Lovecraft writes:
“The one test of the really weird is simply this — whether or not there be
excited in the reader a profound sense of dread, and of contact with
unknown spheres and powers.”2 The dread is profound because it is infi-
nite, which is to say it is a dread in thought as well as in experience; it is
experience which gives weight and menace to the thought. The weird tale
gives the reader an experience with far-reaching and disquieting implica-
tions. In the quotation from Charles Lamb’s “Witches and Other Night-
Fears” with which Lovecraft opens “The Dunwich Horror,” (1928) it is
pointed out that the menacing figures of mythology are not simple haz-
ards. “Is it that we naturally conceive terror from such objects, considered
in their capacity of being able to inflict upon us bodily injury? O, least of
all!”3 In that passage, Lamb argues, sermon-fashion, that mythological
figures have some transcendent significance, and may be taken for symbols
of an ideal world that cannot be directly encountered in experience in any
certain way. They can only be encountered in a bizarre way. This idea
recurs throughout the various works Lovecraft assembles to form his
canon in SHL. Lovecraft takes up this idea in his own way when he writes:
“the literature of mere physical fear and the mundanely gruesome” is not
to be included in the “literature of cosmic fear in its purest sense.”4 This
suggests that “profound dread” and “cosmic fear” are equivalent phrases.
The weird tale, according to Lovecraft, must involve a fear that arises
when the infinity of experience itself is confronted.
According to Lovecraft, this cosmic fear arises in the kind of experience
I will call “bizarre,” and which is the basis for an implied bizarre episte-
mology. A bizarre experience forces one to confront the infinite capacity
of experience as such. That confrontation is lacking in “ordinary” experi-
ence, which is redundant to a finite order of one kind or another, such as
the order of a New England town, or the order of the world as conven-
tional science understands it. Weird fiction centers itself on the bizarre
experience set among ordinary experiences—actually attacking those cir-
cumstances, bursting their limitations apart, showing that those limita-
tions are social, parochial, within people, rather than within experience
itself. This implies a bizarre epistemology, because the bizarre experience
points to the infinity of experience as such—including even the seemingly
finite, ordinary experience. Reading a bizarre story is a bizarre experience,
BIZARRE EPISTEMOLOGY, BIZARRE SUBJECT: A DEFINITION OF WEIRD… 193
not just a description of one. That bizarre experience shows the reader not
only that the limitations put on ordinary literature—Lovecraft’s literary
bugbear of “plodding realism,” [436] for example—do not belong to lit-
erature but to parochial readers and writers. The bizarre experience in the
weird tale re-enchants the world for the reader, even if darkly, to show that
it is a concept delineated in keeping with generalized needs and social
milieus. For one who dares to go beyond these limitations, there is a
frightening, but also invigorating, prospect of infinite experience. Weird
fiction gives us glints of this kind of experience, but only glints: if it were
to go very far in its description of the bizarre experience, it would again
begin to limit it.
The bizarre experience for the reader is primary, for the characters it is
secondary. Here Lovecraft, as a writer who deliberately wrote through a
canon of influences named in SHL, employs techniques he learned mainly
from Poe. In the essay, Poe is praised by Lovecraft for being the foremost
pioneer in the field of the psychology of terror, using his clinical under-
standing of the emotion to shape his stories for maximum effect on the
reader. Lovecraft also foregrounds the importance of the radically outside
in Poe, who established himself as a man of the world, a connoisseur not
confined to any one milieu but equally at home in all. In Poe, then, we get
the second half of the weird equation. The experience is bizarre, but so is
the one who experiences it. The ordinary experience is, from the point of
view of the weird tale, a parochially limited one, but it also belongs to
parochially limited subjects. There is a strict parallel there. The bizarre
overflows the limits conventionally assigned to experience and so rejects
the ordinary epistemology or worldview maintaining that these “natural”
limits belong to experience itself. However, this also means that the sub-
ject is experiencing something outside its own limits, and is also overflow-
ing. The subject re-encounters itself as infinite, possessing limits that
belong not to the subject itself but only to the subject’s particular milieu
and psychology. Behind the many extreme transformations of weird fic-
tion, there is a subtler one… one in which the reader too may share. It is
a transformation in point of view, both with respect to experience and with
respect to the subject itself. The subject is infinite in itself, with limits that
do not belong to it per se but which have only been ascribed to it. The
horrific effect that Lovecraft says is the key to weird fiction, and which he
learned from Poe, arises only insofar as the reader tends to identify with
those limitations. To “identify with” means that the identity of the subject
depends in part on taking these limits for granted as inherent to any sub-
194 M. CISCO
ject and to all experience, so that a threat to these limits is received as a

personal threat. This is the gambit that makes it possible to affect a reader
directly with what are only descriptions of experiences—and made-up
ones at that. The bizarre experience threatens “madness”—but what is
madness, if not this loss of a self defined by recognizable, socially deter-
mined limits?
The bizarre experience and the bizarre subject are both wonderfully
isolated. In praising Poe, Lovecraft writes of the “cunning development”5
of his weird tales. This development is the linking together of impressions,
but it is first and foremost the systematic and thorough disconnection of
the impending climax from anything ordinary. The resulting “bizarre con-
ceptions”6 are bizarre insofar as they are isolated. Their isolation is “won-
derful” in the Spinozan sense of the word “wonder”:
Wonder is the thought of any thing on which the mind stays fixed because
this particular thought has no connection with any others … the mind, from
thinking of one thing, passes immediately on to the thought of another, and
that is that in such cases the images are bound together and so ordered that
one follows another. This concept cannot cover the case when the image is
a strange one.7
According to Lovecraft, the “spectrally macabre” appeals to readers who

have “a capacity for detachment from every-day life.”8 This capacity
enables the reader to disconnect from everyday life as a consequence of the
encounter, in the weird tale, with a bizarre event. If, as Lovecraft writes:
“no amount of rationalization, reform, or Freudian analysis can quite
annul the thrill of the chimney-corner whisper or the lonely wood,”9 then
we are speaking of events or impressions that escape integration into any
connected scheme of things. The implication is that to make such connec-
tions would weaken the thrill. Lovecraft opens SHL with the now-familiar
observation that “mankind’s oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the
unknown.”10 This “unknown” must refer to the kind of isolation that
Spinoza is describing in his definition of wonder. In confronting even a
mundane and immanent threat—the car hurtling toward me, the knife
suddenly whipped from within the jacket—there is nothing mysterious or
hard to understand about the danger, but I still confront a radically
unknowable outcome: will I survive? And sitting in my chair at home,
comfortably reading a weird tale, with nothing to fear, do I not still have
something to survive? Is my home really home, is my comfort really com-
fort, my safety safety, myself myself? If we follow Spinoza’s logic, then it

must be possible for us to have an experience that originates outside the
limitations we set on experience—for example, our efforts to insure that
all our experiences are “safe.” Bizarre events, being disconnected, cannot
be anticipated. The bizarre experience, in turn, will undermine my sense
of self as connected to other people, being like them or of them. The sub-
ject in turn will become something to wonder at, because it is hard to
relate to someone who has emerged from an experience to which we can
form no connection ourselves.
Lovecraft writes that, in Poe’s fiction: “every particular is marshalled
and brought into an easy apparent relation to the known gruesomeness of
material life.”11 Likewise, while the object of wonder is a thought not con-
nected to any other thought, it still must be present to the mind, that is,
it must be encountered. This is perhaps one of the real germs of Lovecraft’s
fiction in general; a broad philosophical proposition about the minimal
position of mankind in the universe, presented as argument, will induce no
wonder, because it must be connected to other ideas, whereas if it is pre-
sented as an encounter or experience, it can appear with its full effect, radi-
cally disconnected, and resisting any attempt to connect it to other ideas.
This is what “the unknown” means for Lovecraft.
In the grip of cosmic fear, the subject exceeds its limits in producing a
vista that dwarfs their generic human scale. This may be why Lovecraft
finds what he refers to as Poe’s “impersonal” approach so praiseworthy.
Here the “impersonal” is the infinite. The writer, at least when writing,
must be detached, a Spinozan wonder, in order to produce such
wonders.
Before Poe the bulk of weird writers had worked largely in the dark; without
an understanding of the psychological basis of the horror appeal, and ham-
pered by more or less of conformity to certain empty literary conventions
such as the happy ending, virtue rewarded, and in general a hollow moral
didacticism, acceptance of popular standards and values, and striving of the
author to obtrude his own emotions into the story and take sides with the
partisans of the majority’s artificial ideas. Poe, on the other hand, perceived
the essential impersonality of the real artist; and knew that the function of
creative fiction is merely to express and interpret events and sensations as
they are, regardless of how they tend or what they prove — good or evil,
attractive or repulsive, stimulating or depressing — with the author always
acting as a vivid and detached chronicler rather than as a teacher, sympa-
thizer, or vendor of opinion.12
196 M. CISCO
The bizarre has two aspects of implication: confrontational and chaotic.

The confrontation posits a counter-ordinary to the ordinary world of the
presumed reader. It may or may not be that the ordinary appears bizarre
from the perspective of the counter-ordinary, but usually the counter-
ordinary also purports to have a superior claim to truth. “The Shadow
over Innsmouth” (1931) and “At the Mountains of Madness” (1931) are
both good examples of this confrontational bizarre, but the danger in
these stories is that the connectedness of the alien world is likely to reduce
the effect of wonder. Henri Bergson wrote that chaos does not exist in
nature; there can be no natural event, including manmade events, which
deviate from the order of nature.13 When we speak of chaos, according to
Bergson, we refer not to the absence of order but to the absence of the
order we desire, and the presence of another, undesired order, instead.
The confrontationally bizarre has something of this aspect; it posits that
what appears bizarre is not the absence of the ordinary but the presence of
a rival ordinary. The shock or scandal of this arises because the ordinary
must typically claim to be necessary, inevitable, and one. The ordinary is
supposed to be a contradiction to the bizarre; the confrontational bizarre
induces disquiet by rejecting that contradiction.
Lovecraft hated Bergson, but this idea of chaos as another order does
help elucidate Lovecraft’s fiction. He created his own non-Bergsonian
type of chaotic implication: namely, one in which the line between the
ordinary and the bizarre is too difficult to find. The Spinozan disconnec-
tion becomes, with Lovecraft, a kind of blindness; it inverts, insofar as
whatever is radically isolated becomes nameless, shapeless, in a way imper-
ceptible except as a kind of violence to our own connected way of under-
standing things—a shock. The radically disconnected Lovecraftian Thing
is so far out that it cannot be related to the ordinary in any specific way but
only to the generic concept of the ordinary. It is an unexperiencable expe-
rience, isolated from “… conventions … popular standards … the major-
ity’s artificial ideas.”14 This induces despair as the possibility is raised that
the ordinary was never anything more than an illusion. Bizarre events are
ruptures, while ordinary events form a continuity. In the absence of the
ordinary, life would be a series of violent ruptures, wild dislocations, chaos.
It is in this phase that the fear of losing the contradiction between bizarre
and ordinary becomes most acute, because here the original or familiar
ordinary vanishes, and with it, the reader’s place in the order of things.
This is what makes weird fiction philosophical; it does have implications
for the reader as well as for the characters, since the bizarre events of the
narrative reflect back on the lack of any guarantee, in or out of the story,
for the ordinary.
Understanding the bizarre, we have to understand the articulations of
the ordinary: the natural, the good, the sane. The bizarre will then be
supernatural, evil, and insane, but to be sufficiently disconnected from
other ideas, the supernatural, the evil, and the insane in weird fiction will
have to be more than mere negations.
If the real is synonymous with the normal and the natural, then the
bizarre, which, given the shape of this logical arrangement, would thence
have to be understood as more or less the opposite of the normal and the
natural both, would have to be a mere negation of the real, since what is
unreal cannot exist. Weird fiction is conceptually possible because there is
a confusion built into this model; if the bizarre is nonexistent, it cannot
intrude into the ordinary, because a nonexistent thing has no causal
efficacy—it is the most disconnected of things. Therefore, according to
this model, the only possible point of origin for the bizarre would have to
be in the real, in the ordinary. Even if we consider that the bizarre occurs
when the ordinary lapses, and is thus still negative, this does not explain
how the ordinary can lapse or how it is restored after such a lapse. Part of
the essence of the concept of the ordinary is that it does not lapse, that it
persists over time, and is regular. An irregular ordinary is an oxymoron—
in other words, bizarre. As the weird tale expands through the narrow
aperture of a single person’s highly anomalous experience, it generates
cosmic fear by jeopardizing a conventional contradiction between the
bizarre event and the ordinary event.
Lovecraft approaches the question in this way:
Serious weird stories are either made realistically intense by close consistency
and perfect fidelity to Nature except in the one supernatural direction which
the author allows himself, or else cast altogether in the realm of phantasy,
with atmosphere cunningly adapted to the visualisation of a delicately exotic
world of unreality beyond space and time, in which almost anything may
happen if it but happen in true accord with certain types of imagination and
illusion normal to the sensitive human brain.15
However different the two types of stories described here may be, they
both involve a reliance on nature; the first is faithful to nature with one
exception, the second is faithful to the nature of certain kinds of human
brains—not souls, nor characters, but material brains, and hence also part
198 M. CISCO
of nature—that must guide the formation of the “phantasy,” so that it is

actually a sort of printout or brain scan, a piece of empirical evidence. The
bizarre experience is empirical, but since, in order to establish the ordi-
nary, it must be understood as in contradiction to the bizarre, the absence
of the contradictions regarded as threatening. Much of the dread gener-
ated by weird fiction is of this kind, stirred up by the prospective absence
of the contradiction between the ordinary and the bizarre. This contradic-
tion is the underpinning of the limitations to subject and experience as
well.
If the bizarre has a positive character, then we might say it would have
to be possible to think the bizarre by itself. Without any relation to the
ordinary, the bizarre would have to be an absolute, and therefore just a
mystery, like any absolute. However, it could be that the problem is not so
much that something is either bizarre or ordinary or that these two terms
refer to states of affairs that are not supposed to be able to coincide; the
problem may be a deeper one, built into a concept of the ordinary that
incorporates a need to contain or segregate the bizarre. The bizarre doesn’t
negate the ordinary, it escapes or disrupts it—but that isn’t supposed to be
possible, and it is commonly assumed that this impossibility inheres in the
ordinary as one of its necessary attributes. The ordinariness of things
doesn’t negate the bizarre either, nor does the ordinary character of cir-
cumstances depend on the bizarre. The scandal that weird fiction helps us
to see is that there is nothing in or beyond the ordinary to guarantee it.
An immanent bizarre is possible, is abundantly evident in experience,
without recourse to transcendence, and as an aspect of nature. This is
why weird fiction has all the weight of any other kind of literature and is
not “mere make-believe,” a judgment which weird fiction is, in part,
designed to discredit. What this take on weird fiction shows us is that
what is fearful is not exactly the prospective existence of a transcendent
supernatural realm—which is often reassuring, for example, when it
comes to religion—but the idea that nothing outside nature prevents
nature itself from changing fundamentally.
Lovecraft persistently shifted from the confines of the supernatural
toward an even less determined idea of outsideness that often seems more
readily identifiable with science fiction, because the bizarre effect, the out-
sideness, counts more. This is why we continue to think of Lovecraft’s
fiction as weird, for the most part, rather than as science fiction. The old
tropes of traditional horror fiction—“secret murder, bloody bones, or a
sheeted form clanking chains according to rule”—are less effective over

time than are the much more radically new and unexpected discoveries
and implications of science, and science fiction.16 The supernatural, in
Lovecraft, tends to subside in favor of the cosmic, although Lovecraft is
interested in the supernatural less as a repository of ancient lore and more
as a signpost pointing to what is beyond human ken. This perspective also
allows us to look at the weird aspects of other works of literature not nor-
mally considered in this context. This is certainly the way Lovecraft read
much fiction, more or less ignoring anything that did not seem weird to
him, and confidently imputing weirdness where others might not. For
Lovecraft, “The Turn of the Screw” (1898) is a ghost story, and that’s pat.
* * *
If we assume that all experience is ordinary, then everything that is not

ordinary must not be experience and therefore bracketed off into a sepa-
rate and highly dubious category of the bizarre or “the fantastic.” This
does not occur however if we do not conflate experience and the ordinary;
if we treat experience as something which can be produced either in an
ordinary way or in a bizarre way, we then arrive at a clearer understanding
of the bizarre as something of its own and as a way in which experience is
expressed, rather than as a certain kind of content in experience. Without
this idea of experience, there would be no satisfactory way to account for
any radical disruption of the ordinary, such as we can readily find examples
of in experience; examples of the very real experiences that are depicted by
weird fiction. The manner in which experience is expressed involves the
subject, but perhaps not, or not primarily, the personality.
This concept of experience calls for an indeterminate ground, not yet
ordinary or bizarre, from which both the ordinary and the bizarre emerge
in expression. The prior ground is needed to account for the possibility of
either mode of expression in experience. Weird fiction is commonly sup-
posed to arise out of a frustration with the limitations of the ordinary. Its
tactic is to use the eruption of the bizarre event to undermine the ordi-
nary; however, in so doing, weird fiction also points to the fact that both
bizarre and ordinary are modes of expression of a prior indeterminate
experience. This is therefore one of the necessary aspects of the genre of
weird fiction: it seeks to point out the existence of pure experience distinct
from the ordinary and the bizarre; that the ground, or fixed reality, is not
the ordinary but something prior. In some cases this will be presented as
200 M. CISCO
the bizarre itself, so that pure experience and the bizarre are conflated.
However, pure experience, being pure, really has no expressed aspect or
mode yet and hence cannot be bizarre. If the bizarre were pure experi-
ence, then any regularity in the bizarre, such as the vampire, the haunted
house, and so on, would have to be taken as attributes of fundamental
reality understood as pure experience, rather than as the modes of expres-
sion they are. Weird fiction is most characteristic of itself when it uses the
bizarre to point toward pure experience which is never itself available to
consciousness but which is also not, or not only, the unconscious mind.
This is the domain that Lovecraft refers to when he speaks, for example, of
Machen’s story, The Great God Pan: “No one could begin to describe the
cumulative suspense and ultimate horror with which every paragraph
abounds without following fully the precise order in which Mr. Machen
unfolds his gradual hints and revelations.”17 The hints and revelations
never add up to a complete picture, however, and this is by design. The
revelation, which is bizarre, affords us an opportunity to contemplate the
ground of experience, or Pan, which is not finite. This is why the weird
tale must hint, and in careful order, so as to keep bringing the reader into
proximity with something that cannot be named. Pan, perhaps, but the
ground of experience, definitely.
The indeterminate ground does not exist in contradiction to deter-
mined states like ordinary or bizarre, because it is prior to them. Keeping
this in mind, we can avoid contradictory dualism without losing weird
fiction along the way, but the bizarre as such still remains to be better
understood. What is ordinary is not shocking; it is a spell or trance that
allows us to repeat a daily routine without being compelled to do any
thinking; it assures smooth functioning by making it possible to recycle
the same plans and by increasing predictability, redundancy. The bizarre is
shocking, not in its negation of the ordinary but as a higher degree of
intensity than the ordinary permits and in its disconnectedness, its lack of
redundancy. Weird fiction places extraordinary, even exaggerated, empha-
sis on the event by maximizing the contrast of intensities between the
ordinary and the bizarre. The bizarre in weird fiction is a way to get at the
event as a shock. Other genres do this as well, so it is necessary to identify
what kind of shock it is that the bizarre produces in weird fiction. Weird
fiction introduces specifically epistemological shocks, using the supernatu-
ral, the impossible.
The key to this shock effect is the careful “tuning” of intensity. The
intensity will not be felt if the event seems phoney. So it has to be rooted
in a sense of something real, and this is done gradually, by the delinking of

the event from possible causes and by initiating the event slowly, raising it
through thresholds of intensity. Pure experience is the domain of pre-
conscious micro-impressions, and this is thematized in weird fiction con-
stantly. When Lovecraft acknowledges Poe the master of psychological
fear, he is discussing precisely this use of the pre-conscious by Poe. The
vibrations, intuitions, flashes of insight, premonitions, inexplicable impres-
sions that any reader of weird fiction is well familiar with could be consid-
ered to arise out of this pre-consciousness or pure experience. The stories
themselves consist of a series of cues that act on readers below their thresh-
old of awareness, combining to create an impression that leaps into con-
sciousness when the author indicates it should. “Poe studied the human
mind rather than the usages of Gothic fiction, and worked with an analyti-
cal knowledge of terror’s true sources.”18 “The Fall of the House of
Usher” (1839) is all about the pre-conscious; the narrator cannot account
for his feeling of gloom looking at the house, even though the scene
before his eyes in no way resembles traditionally gloomy Gothic imagery;
the narrator has a kind of contagious experience of the Lady Madeline’s
catalepsy when he first sees her, feeling stupefied by the sight of her with-
out knowing why. She seems to be trapped in pre-consciousness, and
Roderick’s threshold is likewise bizarrely low. During the recitation of
“The Mad Tryst,” we can see the memory image of the genre materializ-
ing out of a pre-conscious, dreamlike stupidity in a bad text engulfing the
whole story and all in it except the narrator, who is protected by his higher
threshold. He is saved by his own insensitivity—another common theme
of weird fiction. This in turn acts out what “The Fall of the House of
Usher” is meant to do to its reader, via Roderick Usher, who is so hyper-
bolically conscious that he seems on the verge of becoming conscious that
he is a character in a story called “The Fall of the House of Usher.”
In Lovecraft’s own fiction, the last of the de la Poers senses in a mysteri-
ous way the atavistic past of his own family; young Wilcox has accurate
dreams of R’lyeh in “The Call of Cthulhu” (1926); Crawford Tillinghast
invents a machine that reveals to us what creatures surround us at all times
without our knowing it; “The Dreams in the Witch House” (1932) turns
the seeming solidities of reality into countless apertures leading to bizarre
other worlds. The presence of an undetected reality just below the thresh-
old of consciousness haunts Lovecraft’s fiction even more so than it does
Poe’s, and this is another aspect of cosmic fear.
202 M. CISCO
There are those who try to rehabilitate stretches of the unknown by mak-
ing it known, and this group includes some scientists and priests alike, even
if their methods and results are different. They love the unknown the way a
mapmaker loves unexplored territory; that is, it represents a domain into
which their powers may allow them to expand profitably. This idea of the
unknown places it in a contradictory relationship with knowledge; knowl-
edge then sets out to negate the unknown and win territory. But when we
read SHL, more often than not the relationship of knowledge to the
unknown is not presented to us by Lovecraft as a negation but as a proxim-
ity. For example, in praising Blackwood, Lovecraft writes of the “minute
fidelity with which he records the overtones of strangeness in ordinary
things and experiences, or the preternatural insight with which he builds up
detail by detail the complete sensations and perceptions leading from reality
into supernormal life or vision.”19 Overtones do not negate regular tones,
and the existence of one territory of life or vision does not negate the other.
The unknown as the unknown is pure experience, and weird fiction wants
us to remember that pure experience, the unknown, persists as the condi-
tion of knowledge, and is not negated by knowledge. The relationship of
the unknown to knowledge is not contradictory, either. The seeker who
tries to claim territory in the unknown is making a mistake, one that will
often backfire on that seeker.
We can see this perhaps more clearly by looking at Kafka. Snobs will say
that Kafka’s work is too good to be considered weird fiction, but excel-
lence has no bearing on questions of genre. There is a strong temptation
to place Kafka into some kind of relation with weird fiction. If we say that
Kafka’s stories are not horror stories, then we run against his many horrific
scenes, even if horror, as a certain conventional affect, is not what the
story is designed to produce. If we say that Kafka is a writer of weird fic-
tion, this also seems plainly wrong. Kafka, it must be said, wrote a kind of
weird fiction. Where the traditional weird story concerns a disruption of
the ordinary by the bizarre, the bizarre events in Kafka’s fiction are bizarre
entirely to the extent that they are ordinary and vice versa. His fiction
actually performs the miracle, by bringing us into close proximity to the
ground of pure experience itself, through the most scrupulously main-
tained indeterminacy, operating in each story as a refrain. The connected-
ness of Spinoza’s nature is not done away with, but subtilized, so that the
connections are certain to exist but impossible to name with any confi-
dence. We can see the bizarre escaping the ordinary in Kafka right before
our eyes, and we also watch in dismay as the ordinary emerges from the
bizarre. There is no contradictory duality between bizarre and ordinary

because Kafka handles the bizarre and the ordinary as modes of a single
existence, as Spinoza might have done, if Spinoza had written weird tales.
The unknown, in Kafka, likewise persists with the known and is not can-
celed by it. Anything known may turn out to be, not wrong exactly, since
that would also be certain knowledge, but not entirely right, and never
right enough.
In weird fiction, the possibility of madness arises when the subject
encounters the epistemologically bizarre. This kind of literary madness has
nothing directly to do with any idea of mental disorders as defined by
psychoanalysis or psychiatry, although it may make secondary use of these
disorders. The madness of weird fiction is the bizarre subject position, just
as the sanity of weird fiction is the ordinary subject position; it induces
cosmic fear in another mode that parallels the epistemological bizarre. The
bizarre subject position is often presented as a conflict of judgment involv-
ing an ambiguously supernatural event, such that the subject is induced to
question his or her sanity, that is, ordinariness, redundancy, connected-
ness. For Lovecraft, the ambiguity of the genuine weird tale is not really
about psychological disorders, but rather a carefully indirect way of pro-
ducing an aesthetic effect of outsideness. For that matter, Henry James’
remarks on “The Turn of the Screw” indicate that he regarded it as a ghost
story. “The exhibition involved is in other words a fairy-tale pure and
simple—save indeed as to its springing not from an artless and measure-
less, but from a conscious and cultivated credulity.”20 The tale is vague
only because bald supernaturalism is less credible than hedged supernatu-
ralism, and thus less likely to produce the effect of contact with outside-
ness. James does not write the Governess any differently than he writes his
other characters; her perspective and her desires shape her point of view.
Her behavior, given what she sees, is consistent. If she is unreliable, she is
no more unreliable than many of James’ other point of view characters,
nor is she unreliable for reasons any less sane. If the bizarre subject posi-
tion invokes madness, it is with the understanding that anyone can be
mad, even sane people. Sanity is no guarantee against madness.
Poe’s mad narrators are perfectly sane, lucid observers of their own
insanity, and Lovecraft’s madmen are insane to the extent that they are
correct about the epistemologically bizarre. Madness in fact becomes a
way to avoid falling into redundancy, to escape connections that are inad-
equate to the flux of our own experience, so that the subject emerges as a
thinking explorer of experience, rather than as a mere symbol of the
204 M. CISCO
assumed scheme of things. That this is a fearsome thing to do is affirmed

by the emphasis on terror in weird fiction. Only in his early story, “The
Tomb” (1917), and some of his dream stories, do we encounter any sig-
nificant ambivalence about the bizarre in Lovecraft; this ambivalence is
barely significant in “Beyond the Wall of Sleep” (1919) and is no longer
significant in stories like “The Temple” (1920) or “Dagon” (1917), or
even “The Rats in the Walls” (1924). The Lovecraftian tale does not con-
front us with a character who may or may not be mad, but rather takes the
question to the reader, and this is the idea of madness we find in SHL.
Similarly, there is no difficulty in acknowledging that Hill House is defi-
nitely haunted and that Eleanor Vance is in a highly delicate psychological
state. Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (1959) masterfully
plays out the relationship between a house the reader is immediately told
is “not sane” and a haunted main character. There are plenty of other
examples of fiction that straddle the dichotomy of madness and the super-
natural, which show us that it is not only possible to go beyond that
dichotomy, but necessary.
The bizarre subject position therefore only deviates from the ordinary
subject position, which was described by Nietzsche, in Human, All Too
Human (1878), this way:
Philosophers tend to confront life and experience (what they call the world
of appearance) as they would a painting that has been revealed once and for
all, depicting with unchanging constancy the same event. They think they
must interpret this event correctly in order to conclude something about the
essence which produced the painting, that is, about the thing-in-itself,
which always tends to be regarded as the sufficient reason for the world of
appearance.21
The distinction between Henry James and Kafka is that, where James’
subject is in suspense, simply incapable of connecting with some fixed,
commonsensical, consensual truth that exists but is out of reach, the activ-
ity of Kafka’s characters is entirely a consequence of their inability to locate
any place of sufficient detachment. They seem to want to achieve precisely
the kind of disconnection from events that James regards as a problem;
their whole concern is precisely that the truth is not only within reach but
overabundant, contradictory, ever changing, and more pouring in all the
time. They cannot unstick themselves from it, in part because they pro-
duce it, keep altering it. Movement, even if it is only the slightest
ovement, is inevitable, and the perspective of things alters fantastically

m
with each relocation of a point of view that cannot be immobilized. The
smallest shifts in position, and hence of point of view, often produce the
most drastic alterations.
Setting Kafka side by side with James, it appears that Kafka is perhaps
transposing indecision from characters into events more than James does,
but Kafka’s character psychology is in no way less complex than is James’,
nor are the circumstances in James’ fiction any more straightforward. The
difference is greater than a rebalancing of the distribution of indetermi-
nacy. The hesitation in James is not a conventional stage prop—it is one of
the things he finds most interesting: people in over their heads, who wait
and watch to see what to do, deciding not to decide, only to discover that
waiting and watching is still action, and action always changes things in
unexpected ways. Then action can only seem like a kind of recklessness,
even despair. The difference that emerges between James and Kafka is this:
that, in James, Nietzsche’s “painting,” however slowly and carefully, and
with however many emendations, eventually emerges. This is true even in
“The Turn of the Screw,” because when we say, “we can’t know whether
or not Bly was really haunted,” we have arrived at our picture: the truth is
that we cannot say. Many will read Kafka the same way, saying that Kafka’s
point is that things are indeterminate, unknowable, and so on. Kafka’s fic-
tion bears this out, but with the difference that a whole succession of
pictures is produced, all equally true. The truth is said constantly, but it
has no root and does nothing to hold itself in place. Again there is the idea
of there being no external guarantee. The succession of pictures accumu-
lates, with each picture joining the rest, and to say one picture contradicts
another only adds yet another picture; if we say that the truth is something
we can’t say, then by the logic of that very statement, this is another pic-
ture. If we read “The Turn of the Screw” and say that the truth is that the
truth is something we cannot say, then we’ve put an end to our consider-
ation of the problem in the story with a judgment of inconclusiveness, and
this is no less a judgment, which has the effect of stopping us from think-
ing any more about it—worse, even exonerating us from thinking any
more about it.
In SHL, Lovecraft situates weird fiction or cosmic horror more plainly
in line with James’ approach than with Kafka’s, which is itself another turn
of the screw. In this comparison with Kafka, we can see that Lovecraft’s
idea of the parochial ordinary is rather static. However, both writers
endeavor to achieve a certain freedom from the constraints of the ordinary
206 M. CISCO
by using the bizarre to subvert those constraints. This is freedom in part,

from subject and object in contradiction, the Kantian view; a view we can
also find indirectly described in Human, All Too Human:
logicians, after they had rigorously established the concept of the metaphysi-
cal as the concept of that which is unconditioned and consequently uncondi-
tioning, denied any connection between the unconditioned (the metaphysical
world) and the world we are familiar with. So that the thing-in-itself does not
appear in the world of appearances.22
The metaphysical would then be a Spinozan wonder. Nietzsche’s logicians

place pure experience in a transcendent, not an immanent, position. In the
Kantian scheme, the object, as thing-in-itself, is basically the negation of
the subject and experienced by the subject as such. Weird fiction often
exploits this gap between subject and object in experience to scandalize
Lockean readers who take an easy rapport between subject and object for
granted. (This may help us to see why so much of weird fiction is Anglo-
American, considering the persistence of Locke’s influence and that of
philosophers of the “commonsense” school, such as Dugald Stewart.) If
subject and object contradict, then the subject cannot know the object,
and all rational understanding is inferential.
The subject sees an object belonging to a special category: objects not
supposed to exist (supernatural objects). Owing to the assumption that
there is an unbridgeable gap between subjects and objects, the witness is
blocked from giving his or her experience the same weight for others as it
has for him or her, and further, whether or not that subject can be called
a witness at all comes into question. Since the subject is commonly under-
stood to be a basically passive observer of a fixed phenomena, he or she is
blocked from connecting to directly, like Nietzsche’s painting, the threat
of losing a firm hold of witness status is tantamount to the loss of self
entirely. Loss of self is understood to be a form of death, albeit a weird
one, a death not unlike Lovecraft’s wild plunging into chaos, a death with
intensities. So the fear of death is, through this chain of reasoning, brought
to bear on any individual who sees what cannot be seen. It is a very short
step from this idea to the notion that what cannot be seen is what should
not be seen, so that the subject-object philosophical model, which has no
overt moral aspect, slides with suspicious ease into a moral scheme. Then
the supernatural object becomes that form of knowledge described by Poe
in “Ligeia” as “too divinely precious not to be forbidden!”23 Why
forbidden? Why are “we … not meant” to “voyage far” from our “placid
island of ignorance”?24 Perhaps, in part, because being shapeless is forbid-
den. Madness is an illicit freedom, but to whom? Who does the
forbidding?
* * *
When we turn from contradictory arrangements dependent on negative

terms, we can begin to think about the bizarre as a mode of experience
and see how weird fiction treats the concept of pure experience. When we
turn from a contradictory arrangement of subject and object, we can begin
to think about how weird fiction points to the fear, and even coercion,
that causes people to cling to these contradictions and to dread the arrival
of a perspective that does without them. That weird fiction involves threats
to identity is not a new observation, but now it is possible to see more
deeply into the nature of that threat. Weird fiction shows the attentive
reader that there are no inherent limits to experience, identity, the world,
or reality.
* * *
Notes
1. H.P. Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror in Literature, Dagon and Other
Macabre Tales (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1965), 368.
2. Ibid.
3. Lovecraft, “The Dunwich Horror,” The Dunwich Horror and Others (Sauk
City, WI: Arkham House, 1963), 155.
5. Ibid, page 399.
6. Ibid.
7. Baruch Spinoza, Complete Works (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett,
2002), page 312.
208 M. CISCO
13. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution (New York: Dover Press, 1998), 232
passim.
20. Henry James, “Introduction,” The Aspern Papers (London: Macmillan and
Co, 1922), XVII.
21. Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human (Lincoln, NE: University of
Nebraska Press, 1996), 23.
22. Ibid.
23. Edgar Allan Poe, “Ligeia,” Tales and Sketches 1831–1842 (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 316.
24. H.P. Lovecraft, “The Call of Cthulhu,” The Dunwich Horror and Others
(Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1963), 125.
CHAPTER 11
Speaking the Unspeakable: Women, Sex,

and the Dismorphmythic in Lovecraft,
Angela Carter, Caitlín R. Kiernan,
and Beyond
Gina Wisker
H. P. Lovecraft is known for shying away from representations of women,

as well as anything overtly sexual. His women are likely to be abject con-
structs, and the sex he refers to something evil, demonic, a pact with a
Satanic creature, with the fishy folk, or white apes, each example of misce-
genation leading to a threat to humankind. The insipidity, problematic
allure, and treacherous fecundity of the women in Supernatural Horror in
Literature (19271; SHL) set the tone for Lovecraft’s treatment of women
and their sexual culpability in his tales.
There is a filial legacy of Lovecraft’s work. Many male authors, includ-
ing Robert Bloch and Neil Gaiman, have extended, built on, his writing,
taken further the tropes, settings, stories, and sometimes, like Gaiman in
“Shoggoth’s Old Peculiar” (19982) and Only the End of the World Again
(20003), they have also taken a comic turn. But perhaps surprisingly there
G. Wisker (*)
CLT, University of Brighton, Brighton, UK

210 G. WISKER
is also an emerging legacy in work by women writers, notably Angela

Carter and Caitlín R. Kiernan, and most recently in the collection She
Walks in Shadows (20154), which invited women to be inspired by, respond
to, and reimagine Lovecraft’s work. Not all of these writers merely expose
him for a misogynist. Some seek the backstory to the women who spawn
the offspring of the creatures from the deeps, from the stars, from a
Lovecraftian pit of the weird. Some extend and morph the plotlines or
provide a future for the women in Lovecraft’s tales. Some take Lovecraftian
tropes and explore them in different, contemporary contexts.
Angela Carter exposes the basis of his sexual terrors in a particularly
male idolatry of woman as a powerful, dismorphmythic creature grown
from a fear and loathing of sex, leading to an offloading of that disgust and
terror on to the abjected woman, a mixed and troubled response theorised
by Julia Kristeva.5 Lovecraft’s recognised disgust at difference and disabil-
ity and his sexism are revealed as a familiar product of a kind of pathologi-
cal terror at all things Other and all things sexual, a terror found in much
fin de siècle writing and art, where women are represented as simultane-
ously sexually alluring, terrifying, monstrous, and abject, a construction
which reappears in the femmes fatales of, for example, film noir. Horror
and the comic share many characteristics, however, and comic Gothic hor-
ror provides an effective way of puncturing the mix of adulation, terror,
disgust, and abjection with which women are sometimes portrayed. Several
of the women writers in She Walks in Shadows choose that mode, focusing
sometimes on the sexual fears, sometimes on reducing the weird to the
banal everyday, while Angela Carter does both. Carter exposes Lovecraft’s
mystification and shuddering terror at woman, made into an undying,
mythical, sexualised creature who lets in the destructive darkness and does
so particularly in Nights at the Circus (19876), with her portrayal of the
designs and actions of two eminently powerful men, Christian Rosencreutz
and the Grand Duke.
This essay focuses on Lovecraft and his legacy in the work of Carter,
Kiernan, and a range of other women authors, including Mary Turzillo7
and Wendy Wagner,8 each published in She Walks in Shadows.9 It traces the
fascination Lovecraft has with the myths of abject and dangerous women
beginning with SHL and proceeding to the short stories of women as
monstrous, vulnerable, enthralling (“Medusa’s Coil,” 193910), as deadly
hags (“The Dreams in the Witch House,” 193211; “The Dunwich Horror,”
192912), as capable of luring travellers and students to hell, coupling with
the devil or inhuman creatures (“The Shadow over Innsmouth,” 193613).
SPEAKING THE UNSPEAKABLE: WOMEN, SEX, AND THE DISMORPHMYTHIC… 211
It goes on to consider how Carter, Kiernan, and several others expose the
sexual roots of such a fascination, such disgust, instead writing from the
women’s perspectives, giving them identity and agency. Carter, Kiernan,
Wagner, Turzillo, and others reinvigorate and explore the hidden agendas,
and/or turn the tables on those whose overheated, disgusted imaginations
represent women as hags, serpentine seducers with evil intent, and bestial
betrayers of pure bloodlines. They write from and against Lovecraft’s
abject representations of woman as Other, his lurking fears of deformity,
miscegenation, and sexual energies.
H. P. Lovecraft, Sex, and Women

SHL sets up both a rich, selective history of weird horror, its roots in the
supernatural rather than the mere terrors of the everyday (or night time)
reality, and exhibits a kind of pathological disgust concerning procreation
and fertility. In the second chapter, “The Dawn of the Horror-Tale,” for
example, his tone of informed, assertive persuasion, outlining the sources
of horror, is intermixed with shuddering distaste at “lips” (4), “revolting
fertility-rites of immemorial antiquity” (4), and “breeding-seasons” (5) of
animals connected to witchcraft. He uses a range of words related to the
dangers of rapture and desire involving the “daemon lover” (5), and
“corpse-bride” (5), and to procreation and birth: “born” (5), “fertile”
(5), linked with “slyly” (14), “daemonic” (18), “monstrous morbidities of
witchcraft and black magic” (5), and once, “Ymir and his shapeless spawn”
(5). In the third chapter, in his discussion of established Gothic tales
including The Castle of Otranto (176414), Melmoth the Wanderer (182015),
the “generally-insipid” (8) heroines are dismissed as mundane, as is much
of the narrative because at once realistic and full of staged performances.
SHL speaks of the deformities of the Welsh, the frailty or disgusting evil of
women in Arthur Machen’s work. He links all of these terrors in Machen’s
“The Novel of the Black Seal” (189516) “in the lovely reaches of Wales, a
strange son born to a rural mother after a fright” suggests “a hideous con-
nection and a condition revolting to any respecter of the human race.”
The child, an “idiot boy … jabbers strangely at times in a repulsive hissing
voice, and is subject to odd epileptic seizures” (97). Women are more than
frail in Machen’s “The White People” (190417) with “revolting orgies of
the Witches’ Sabbath” (95), and disgusting rites learned by a nurse from
her witch grandmother which lead a young girl, at puberty, overtaken by
a “banefully beautiful” “cryptic” horror to poison herself.
212 G. WISKER
Two common problems emerge in our reading of the work of Lovecraft,

master of horror: his fictional representations of or absence of women, and
his terror and disgust at otherness, which manifests itself most obviously
as racism. The two come together in the terrifying results of miscegena-
tion, a Lovecraftian staple. It is not surprising, then, that contemporary
women writers might decide to foreground, interrogate, undercut, remy-
thologise issues and characters who represent concerns to do with gen-
dered and racial difference, while also building on his rich scenarios of
horror. Lovecraft’s cosmic and undersea worlds are where eternal power-
ful creatures lurk, and when invited by deliberate acts, invade, mate, over-
whelm local folk and their bloodlines, advance forces presaging an utterly
undermined security in human identity, and potentially the end of the
world. The fishy creatures from the depths in “The Shadow over
Innsmouth” mate with the women of the village, although (as in much of
Lovecraft’s work), this is suggested, rather than detailed. The indescrib-
able act results in a pact between the fishy and village folk through the
now intermixed beings, an economic treaty leading to an abundance of
fish, rich jewellery, and grotesque semi-human offspring.
Lovecraft’s migrant invaders are subtle, utterly ruining and morphing
bloodlines through their sexual relations with culpable, deranged women.
They are also intrusively colonial, overtly invasive in terms of their buying
support through investment (fish, gold) and ensuring continuity through
shared, hidden, religious practices. Many of the threats in Lovecraft’s work
resemble those in Stoker’s Dracula (189718)—women’s unlicensed sexu-
ality, the invasion of non-human, dubiously treated foreign others (not
like “us,” whoever “us” refers to). They also find worrying resonance in
contemporary racist, sexist propaganda concerning “migrant hordes” and
“swarms” when referring to the 2015–18 refugee crisis. These ongoing
and contemporary resonances perhaps explain why insightful women writ-
ers are revealing their unsubtle tendencies, hidden messages, contradic-
tions, abject terrors, and flaws.
Biography and Sources

For Joyce Carol Oates, Lovecraft is “the king of weird,” for whom “the
gothic tale would seem to be a form of psychic autobiography” (199619).
Howard Phillips Lovecraft was an only child, his father a travelling salesman
for a Providence silversmithing company. The father exhibited dementia,
depression, and paranoia and, as Oates comments, was “probably a victim
of untreated syphilis,” dying in an insane asylum when Lovecraft was only

seven.20 Biographers suggest that his mother Susie, the unstable, emo-
tional, reclusive daughter of a well-to-do Providence businessman, was
both excessively attached to Lovecraft and critical of him. Oates comments
on his “widowed, ailing mother Susie, who seems to have made of her
son’s personal appearance (tall, gaunt, with a long, prognathous jaw and
frequently blemished skin) an image of moral degeneracy,”21 which could
have led to his claustrophobia and sexual disgust.22 Not surprisingly,
according to Frank Belknap Long’s Howard Phillips Lovecraft: Dreamer on
the Night Side 23 and S. T. Joshi’s H. P. Lovecraft: A Life,24 it can be argued
that his parents’ behaviours are sources for his loathing and fear of moral
and hereditary degeneracy, and their cause: women and miscegenation.
There are other potential sources in the women in his life. When his mother
died, his spinster aunts brought him up while the other main female influ-
ence was the more modern New Yorker Sonia Greene, who was briefly his
wife, and with whom he had relationship problems. Lovecraft also had
female writing collaborators including Winifred V. Jackson, Anna Helen
Crofts, Sonia H. Greene, Hazel Heald, and Catherine L. Moore, whose
tales he often ghostwrote, co-wrote, or completed as a source of income
(he offered the same service to male writers, including Harry Houdini,
which in the end, like several others, was not a positive collaboration).
Exploring his papers and letters, Bruce Lord suggests that “Lovecraft places
sex in direct opposition to intellect and the pursuit of intellectual ends.”25
Joshi notes that when he was eight, Lovecraft read about sex, found it dis-
gusting and “prosaic,” preferring the moral restraint of the Puritans as an
indication of human development, and intellect:
a Puritan in the conduct of life is the only kind of man one may honestly
respect. I have no respect or reverence whatever for any person who does
not live abstemiously and purely … in my heart I feel him to be my inferior –
nearer the abysmal amoeba and the Neanderthal man.26
Simultaneously he seems to have seen sexual activity as a sign of

degeneracy:
a mechanism which I rather despised or at least thought non-glamourous

because of its purely animal nature & separation from such things as intellect
& beauty – & all the drama was taken out of it.27
214 G. WISKER
With the close examples of his syphilitic father and his unstable mother,
Lovecraft rolls together sexual activity, women and miscegenation, a hor-
rific (in his view) result of misbreeding with dangerous others. These are
ideas derived from a prurience which is common in his time (see Bram
Dijkstra’s Idols of Perversity 28) but which belies his own fears and fascina-
tion with women and sex.
Lovecraft has a particular distaste for sex and coupling with the Other,
and wayward grandmothers are a familiar culpable cause of identity horror
when miscegenation is discovered and the narrator or protagonist becomes
aware that he bears the terrible curse of his deviant ancestry. Arthur
Jermyn’s grandmother (“Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and
His Family,” 192129) mated with a white ape. Shub-Niggurath, “The
Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young,” is also mentioned in
several tales, her over-productive spawning clearly as disgustingly threat-
ening as her origins. In “The Shadow over Innsmouth,30” grandmothers
engaged in sexual acts with the undersea fishy folk, while the albino, intel-
lectually challenged Lavinia Whateley in “The Dunwich Horror31” was
sexually entangled with Yog-Sothoth, a Mythos creature (referred to in
several stories but not fully described). She produced the variously tenta-
cled and monstrously Other Whateley twin brothers, of whom only Wilbur
can move among humans. Nine foot tall, Wilbur wears long coats and is
discovered to have tentacles below the waist and a smell that sends dogs
mad with anger. His monstrous twin is kept from human sight in the out-
house, where he is cared for by the grandfather, mad old Whateley, Lavinia,
and Wilbur, fed local cows, and grows to an enormous size, exploding
himself and the building when his carers die. Lovecraft enacts his racism,
sexism, and terror at disability in this tale.
There are other dangerous, duplicitous, plotting, and deviant women in
his work, though not all are sexually terrifying and disgusting. None are
caring, trustworthy, maternal, or stable. “The Dreams in the Witch House”
(197032) has a landlady with occult designs on her student tenants. Nabby
Gardner in “The Colour Out of Space” (192733) descends into madness;
Lady Margaret Trevor from Cornwall (“The Rats in the Walls,” 192434) is
a threat to local children and the evil heroine of an old ballad. Both Audrey
Davis in “The Curse of Yig” (192935) and De la Poer in “The Rats in the
Walls36” are murderers ultimately committed as criminally insane. Asenath
Waite from “The Thing on the Doorstep” (193737), possessed by her
deceased father, is a confusing character whose unstable identity indicates
women’s dangerous nature, among other things. However, as a figure of
contestation, she has proved extremely popular among the women writers
who respond to and write from or against Lovecraft in She Walks in
Shadows.38 The women in co-written tales are also deadly, duplicitous, and
sexually transgressive. “The Last Test” (192839) and “The Curse of Yig40”
are among Lovecraft’s revisions/collaborations with women authors, as is
“Medusa’s Coil,41” co-written with Zealia Bishop. This latter tale inter-
mixes Lovecraftian distaste for sexually energetic women with designs
upon men, whether their husbands (Denis de Russy) or those who would
paint them (Frank Marsh), with more familiar fin de siècle depictions of
women as femmes fatales, snakes, Gorgons, half animal, half human, rep-
resentations of desire as bestial. Marceline in “Medusa’s Coil”42 seems a
compelling foreign beauty but carries a terrible secret. Like Oscar Wilde’s
Dorian Gray (189143), her evil, dark, demonic self is only revealed in Frank
Marsh’s terrible picture of her. This revelation, like the uncovering of
Dorian’s picture in which all the sins of the flesh and soul have led to a vile,
putrid, decaying horror, shows her possessed by a huge black snake.
Marceline is a more conventional siren drawn from the contemporary fas-
cination with women as whores, beasts, goddesses, and deadly serpents,
but she is also from New Orleans and somewhat dark skinned, a heated
product of Lovecraft’s racism and Othering.
Miscegenation and Fishy Folk

As Silvia Moreno-Garcia comments, Lovecraft’s fixation with eugenics
and sexual hierarchy always and necessarily positions men above women
intellectually and in terms of human value. Responding to Simone de
Beauvoir in The Second Sex (194944) and Barbara Creed in The Monstrous
Feminine (199345), Moreno-Garcia argues that “For Lovecraft, however,
all women appear to be Others, all women are ‘monstrous’. Only men are
normal. And only certain, men at that” (1746). Lovecraft is fixated on mis-
cegenation, a disgusting terror and one for which all women, particularly
mothers and grandmothers, contribute when mating with the fishy folk,
Elder Gods, white apes, whatever inhuman-threatening creatures enter
their lives. His racism and sexism intersect, loose or economically origi-
nated sexual acts lead to racial degeneration, and the possible end of the
world (“The Dunwich Horror47”). In Arthur Jermyn’s family, his music
hall mother is a hidden problem, and further back the historical grand-
mother seems to have mated with a white ape in Africa and been turned
into an African idol (“Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His
216 G. WISKER
Family48”). In “The Shadow over Innsmouth,49” the protagonist ignores

the traditional horror-tale warnings, catches the bus to the town no one
stays in, plies an old man with whiskey for an interview, stays the night
against all good advice, and comes into close proximity with the towns-
people’s mutated descendants, the fishy folk. The experience is equally
bizarre and disturbingly frightening. The priests of the cult religion of
Dagon, who wear tall tiaras, duck in and out of the seemingly ordinary
houses turned places of worship. The jewellery is foreign and strange, the
atmosphere threatening. Terms used of the mutated people such as
“hordes,” and “swarms,” dehumanise them and remind twenty-first cen-
tury readers uncomfortably of both zombies (invasive, mindless) and the
language very recently (2015–18) used of migrants/refugees, each
deemed Other, and less than human. Lovecraft was horrified at the immi-
grant population of New York, and Angela Carter noted the Portuguese-
settled inhabitants in Providence as potential fuel for his racism.50 In
“Innsmouth,” the narrator-protagonist is disgusted by the non-human
behaviour of the inhabitants:
the blasphemous fish-frogs of the nameless design – living and horrible –

and as I saw them I knew also of what that humped, tiaraed priest in the
black church basement had so fearsomely reminded me. Their number was
past guessing. It seemed to me that there were limitless swarms of them.51
He discovers that historically the people of the town mated with the fishy
folk, the resultant rich catches reviving their dying fishing industry. While
this might be understood as ensuring their survival, less acceptable is the
acquisition of that strange jewellery, wages of what is represented as a vile
sin, miscegenation. On returning home, the protagonist recognises similar
jewellery in the family treasures and realises he is himself a descendant of
the Innsmouth Marsh family:
I gazed at their pictured faces with a measurably heightened feeling of repul-

sion and alienation. I could not at first understand the change, but gradually
a horrible sort of comparison began to obtrude itself on my unconscious.52
The inherited taint and guilt, it seems, lies with his degenerate
grandmother.
Instead of a message about embracing the Other as oneself, recognising
the stranger is a construction, as one would identify from the work of Julia
Kristeva,53 Lovecraft presents this revelation as causing abject terror and

disgust. The decay of the human race is seen to have spread more widely,
beyond its containment in the seaside town.
Although neither Arthur Jermyn nor the narrator of “Innsmouth” can
bear the truths about their origins and heredity, in “Innsmouth” the nar-
rator is eventually drawn into acknowledging his heritage, something the
reader feels is not supported by Lovecraft, seen instead as an inevitable
degeneracy. He has a “frightful dream”54 of meeting his grandmother on
the ocean floor in a context of weird otherness, and plans to release his
cousin from an insane asylum, together joining the historical family long
hidden from their knowledge. Joyce Carol Oates makes a direct connec-
tion between Lovecraft’s own life and the end of the tale, when she defines
this act: “To expunge the drama of having witnessed a parent’s descent
into madness one may join the madness oneself.”55
It is hardly surprising, given Lovecraft’s absences and skewed represen-
tations of women, that contemporary women Gothic horror writers would
want to seize and reimagine his women, offer a backstory or a future, or
completely rewrite the situations and events, using horror, carnival, par-
ody, pastiche.
Lovecraft’s misogyny is a target for Angela Carter, as is his reticence in
naming the horrors he conjures. She brings her demythologising, down-
to-earth realism as well as her own version of replaying and parodying vari-
ous fantasies to bear on the kinds of constructions and representations of
women which Lovecraft, among others, dangerously produces.
Angela Carter Demythologises

Angela Carter, who turned the tables on many misrepresentations of
women’s sexuality, travelled to Providence to seek out Lovecraft in his-
tory, in traces. She was intrigued both by his compulsion to represent
women as abject and his deployment of sexual imagery in depicting terrors
unknown. A late twentieth-century feminist, Carter is both influenced by
and has a wicked passion for debunking male sexualised terrors and fetishi-
sation of women. Some of her sources for these terrors include Jacobean
revenge tragedy, the darker fairy tales of Perrault and Grimm, the work of
Edgar Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft, the fin de siecle’s mix of disgust and
carnival, film noir, popular fiction and film, and pornography from de Sade
onwards. Carter explores the treatment of evil and the abjection of women
in Lovecraft, adding a touch of irony, humour, parody, as she exposes the
218 G. WISKER
disgust with which he constructs women and anything to do with sex.

Carter’s femme fatales overturn the designs of their would-be puppeteers
and manipulators, including the Asiatic professor in The Loves of Lady
Purple (197456), Uncle Philip in The Magic Toyshop (196757), and the pri-
mary focus in this essay, the Grand Duke and Christian Rosencreutz in
Nights at the Circus (198758). Her women laugh, calculate, escape, refus-
ing to internalise the disempowering narratives which would lock them up
in their appearances, the myths of denigration, forever. Evil is not a super-
natural occurrence in Carter, and women refuse to remain in the roles of
aged hag, whore, victim, monster, or source of all evil.
The introduction of She Walks in Shadows points out that it is a popular
view that women prefer not to write weird or Mythos-influenced work
“The first spark was the notion, among some fans of the Lovecraft Mythos,
that women do not like to write in this category, that they can’t write in
this category.”59 If that were the case, it could be because of the rather
predictable deified and reified parts women have to play in such work.
However, this is not true of the stories in the collection, nor of the much
earlier work of Carter. Carter’s writing is particularly clear and outspoken
when debunking myths which constrain women, locking them up in
appearance, in subordinate performative roles. Her down-to-earth, no-
nonsense critique and humour is fuelled by a very real awareness of the
dangers of being defined by and caught up in some powerful other’s con-
straining myth:
I believe that all myths are products of the human; mind and reflect only
aspects of material human practice. I’m in the demythologising business ….
How that social fiction of my ‘femininity’ was created by means outside my
control, and palmed off on me as the real thing …. This investigation of the
social fictions that regulate our lives – what Blake called the ‘mind-forged
manacles’ – is what I’ve concerned myself with consciously since that time.60
Her Gothic comic horror uses pastiche, parody, and the bawdy and her
earthy, very tangible versions of human evil contrast with the hidden
threats, the suggestiveness of Lovecraft’s own unnameable horrors and
lurking fears. She notes:
Lovecraft tacitly assumes that the ‘unnameable’ is the temporary embodi-

ment of a free-form, cosmic evil like a blasting dew. This is a convention of
the genre in which he works. Some of the consolatory quality of the tale of
supernatural terror lies in this; that it removes evil from the realm of human
practice and gives it the status of a visitation from another realm of being. It
is an affliction. It is a possession.61
Carter’s critique of the dangerous absurdity of deifying and then destroy-

ing women as a form of sexual threat projected from male squeamish sex-
ual fears is (to me) a clear response to Lovecraft’s depiction of hags, bestial
couplings (never seen but hinted at) and the vulnerability to which wom-
en’s illicit, sexual behaviour potentially leads the whole of humanity. This
response peaks in Nights at the Circus. Her character, Fevvers, a larger
than life, performative cockney Venus, fledgling protected child of a sis-
terly whorehouse, is a winged woman with a heart of gold, aerialist, and
well versed in the arts of deception and entertainment. Fevvers is a
twentieth-century feminist match for Lovecraft’s pantheon, his crones,
lascivious female relatives who couple with a variety of demonic, mythic,
fishy, or bestial creatures to bring about the advent of the Elder Gods, the
end of the world as we know it, springing from his pathological need to
mythologise then abject women.
In Nights at the Circus,62 Fevvers’ strength is in her personal control
over her own being as both fact and fiction. She’s earthy, gargantuan in
many ways, larger than life, comic, yet material and materialistic, often to
the point of putting herself in danger. In the opening scenes, set on the
cusp of the century in her dressing room after her performance, Fevvers is
interviewed about her history and status as a bird woman by the American
journalist, Walser, in front of the poster which shows her in full flight. The
very energy and bawdiness of her larger than life being is contrasted with
the static clock, stuck at midnight, the witching hour, a time which licenses
fantasy. The events of the novel intermix the down-to-earth with the fan-
tastic so that it is hard to define and pin down this real and magical woman,
as the powerful men, Christian Rosencreutz, the Grand Duke, and others
who try, discover. She is dressed up as winged Venus in the brothel in
which she lives as a child and learns to fly by first jumping off the side-
board, but we also see her perform in the circus in a slow motion flight as
an aerialist, a move which only a bird woman rather than one on a string
could manage.
Carter’s short stories and novels upset representations of women as
performative whores, puppets, objects of desire, and victims of the drive to
idolise, control, and destroy. In this respect, Christian Rosencreutz is the
main target in her engagement with Lovecraft’s version of women.
220 G. WISKER
Rosencreutz deifies Fevvers, attempting to control her. In his role in the

House of Lords, his view is that women should not have votes “on account
of how women are of a different soul-substance to men, cut from a differ-
ent bolt of spirit cloth,” pure, rarefied, and not able to bother about poli-
tics. His house reeks of dominant masculine power, political and economic.
The Times newspaper; the rich leather; the heavy, wooden studded doors;
marble bathroom; the ornaments; and objects of the fabric of the place are
constant reminders of control and cruelty. Rosencreutz greets her in a
priestly white robe tied with a cord and she catches sight of a heavy book,
the “Mysterium Baphometis Revelatum,”63 which has the same kind of
invented mythic power base as anything from Lovecraft’s imagination,
particularly his fictional grimoire, book of horrors, and illicit knowledge,
the Necronomicon. Rosencreutz wishes to sacrifice Fevvers, over whom he
takes power by naming in his own way, as an angel, and a host of other
beings (Azrael etc.), each of which suggests sacrifice. To maintain power,
he calls her by the name she refuses to use, Sophia. “Azreal, Azrail, Ashirel,
Azriel, Azaril, Gabriel, Dark angel of many names, welcome to me, from
your home in the third heaven,”64 “Flora,” “Venus Pandemos.”65
His next chant is:
Lady of the hub of the celestial wheel, creature half of earth and half of air,
virgin and whore, reconciler of fundament and firmament, reconciler of
opposing states through the mediation of your ambivalent body, reconciler
of the grand opposites of death and life.66
This precedes his insistence that she dies on the altar. While the danger is
real, the incantation is dealt with by Carter through Fevvers as gibberish,
and the various signs of power Rosencreutz carries with him, including his
rose coiled, penis rampant pendant which “aspires upwards,” “dragged
down” by the female part, are exposed as a constructed nonsense.
Rosencreutz intones pseudo-religiously “the female part, or absence, or
atrocious hole, or dreadful chasm, the Abyss, Down Below, the vortex
which sucks everything dreadfully down, down, down where Terror
rules,”67 which Fevvers recognises as tedious and pretentious “neo-Platonic
Rosicrucianism.”68 The deification and reification of women is his plot, his
aim is to capture, control, then destroy Fevvers so that he ingests her power
to make him somehow immortal. Luckily, Fevvers has the energy to break
his spell and escape, flying free of the legitimated insanity of this version of
male sexualised power. As he approaches with a blade, Fevvers realises she
is to be sacrificed to his insane notions. Stabbing him with her ornate toy
sword, she escapes, leaving feathers behind, earthy, shaken but in control.
The scene emphasises Carter’s debunking of extreme masculine terror
at women’s sexuality, a sexuality constructed as some kind of power to
enable eternal life. This is based on various heightened, intense inventions,
supported by myths in which woman is both life force and sacrificial vic-
tim, dangerous in her sexuality, objectified, reified, deified, and sacrificed.
Fevvers’ commonsensical responses interpose Rosencreutz’s incantatory
rapturous inputs. Her escape is a deflation for the mystical nonsense he has
spun, upon which he has built his notion of everlasting life, and a triumph
for her very everyday self-awareness, energy, and the self-preservation
implicit in action. When she escapes the mythos-dominated misogynist
Christian Rosencreutz, Fevvers flies away through the trees in the early
morning, landing bruised but free.
The novel licenses the reality of the fictional, the fantastic, while cri-
tiquing the mythologising imposed upon Fevvers and women more gener-
ally, which Rosencreutz, the Grand Duke, and others perpetrate when
trying to take over her freedom and her body. She is a winged, free agent,
neither a sprite to be caught and tamed nor a mythical goddess of some
merged version of sources for Rosencreutz nor a golden bird static and
petrified, on a golden swing, for the Grand Duke who shrinks and controls
everything he desires to own. She is her own free agent, and her refusal of
these men’s fantasies undercuts and ridicules them, while never ignoring
the danger their power represents. Finally, she has control over her own
sense of fantastic freedom, her own agency.
Angela Carter visited Providence in search of traces of Lovecraft, com-
mented on his gravestone carving “I am Providence,” the weather, the
settled migrants. Her essays, collected in Shaking A Leg, show her interest
in his recurrent themes and entities. With her usual humour she notes his
sexual restraint, his expressionism, the marvellous, the bizarre and
unnameable, and his construction of:
tales of terror which impose an expressionist landscape of dread and menace

upon the mundane geography of New England. Some of these tales (like
‘The Picture in the House’, ‘At the Mountains of Madness’, perhaps and
one or two others) conform to the surrealistic aesthetic of convulsive
beauty.69
222 G. WISKER
She also notes the 1960s and 1970s resurgence of interest in his work:
“Lovecraft had a great vogue during the acid honeymoon of the last
decade”:
He can invoke the marvellous, usually when he is not trying too hard to do
so. He invented a bizarre cosmogony full of ambivalent deities with names
that look like typing errors. Hastur, the Unspeakable, Chthulhu, who lies in
the watery depths. Nyarlothotep, the Messenger. Shub-Niggurath, the black
goat of the woods with a thousand young.70
Carter recognises that Lovecraft’s interest in sex is deeply buried, neither

prurient nor homoerotic, although octopoidal creatures somewhat invade
Rosa Dexter in what she suspects is a co-written piece:
Fond as he was of tentacles, he never – being a fine, old-fashioned, New

England gentleman – allowed them to sully the flesh of a white woman.71
Tentacles, and sexual fascination, are part of the subject of Caitlín

R. Kiernan’s “Houses under the Sea” (2003).72
Caitlín R. Kiernan
Where Angela Carter is an earthy, feminist, and comic debunker of
Lovecraft’s archaic language, fascination with esoteric knowledge and
power, terror at difference, at female fecundity and the bodily, Kiernan
rejuvenates the strange and revivifies the underlying sexual fascination
which Lovecraft wraps in the winding sheets of disgust and death. Herself
a resident of Providence, Rhode Island, where Lovecraft was born and
lived, Kiernan has been called his spiritual granddaughter, a title she rel-
ishes. “Houses Under the Sea” was invited for a second collection by the
horror editor Ellen Datlow, partly to feed her own lifelong fascination
with Lovecraft and the good writing arising from his work. In this tale
Kiernan explores the compulsive, unavoidable fascination of a contempo-
rary man with Jacova Angevine, an ancient but contemporary woman,
herself from the fishy folk. Datlow forbade “use of the words ‘eldritch’, or
‘ichor’, and no mention of Cthulhu or his minions. And especially no ten-
tacles.73” However, there are, of course some tentacles in the collection.
Kiernan acknowledges Lovecraft’s influence:
I think what Lovecraft taught me was the paramount importance of mood if

one is to create genuinely masterful dark fantasy. And, also, he taught me
the power of suggestion, that it’s so much more effective to hint at the nature
of the unknown than to throw the door wide open, that it’s the unknown
that truly terrifies and inspires awe and wonder. The known can always be
dismissed. Too few people ever get past his god things and arcane texts,
which are really only window dressing, to find the heart of some of the most
powerfully atmospheric prose of the weird ever written. Lovecraft’s
“mythos” is only a delivery device for his deeply subversive cosmicism, in
which all of human history is, at best, a dust mote in an indifferent gulf of
time and space.74
This comment deliberately ignores critical concern over Lovecraft’s racism

and sexism, moving beyond the “window dressing” of gods and the arcane
to recognise both his talent for atmosphere, the indescribable and proba-
bly unnameable, the weird, and a grander, cosmic perspective where
humankind is put in its (rather inferior) place. Kiernan neither attacks and
undermines nor parodies the Lovecraft-inspired woman, Jacova Angevine,
at the heart of her story, instead emphasising her eternal, otherworldly
power, the allure of the inexplicable, the mixed charm and threat, found
traditionally in mythic or faery folk. Where Lovecraft provides a narrator
who discovers to his horror, his own origins among the inhabitants of
Innsmouth, marking the proximity of the human to the abject, underlin-
ing disgust at miscegenation, corruption, greed, Otherness, in “Houses
Under the Sea” Kiernan offers us a similar undersea world to that sug-
gested in Lovecraft’s own work, but nuanced differently. Kiernan does not
look at the hags or culpably weak human females; instead, she focuses on
the erotic attraction of Angevine, an undersea woman, whose eternal cir-
cle, drawn around the narrator, will forever trap him in his memories. He
replays the TV footage of a sinking submarine which proves both an
undersea world and his actual sexual encounters with her. In Kiernan’s
story, Lovecraft’s Innsmouth is displaced to the California coast, and
Angevine is a former Berkeley professor expelled from academia because
of esoteric research. The prophetic head of the “Open Door of the Night”
cult, Angevine is an eroticised fantasy memory to the protagonist. She is
simultaneously a leader of an undersea cult, who leads her earthly follow-
ers to drowning or eternal life, and like a traditional mermaid, fascinating,
offering a deadly embrace. The first vision of Jacova Angevine reminds us
of John Fowles’ novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman (196975). Sara
224 G. WISKER
Woodruff is glimpsed, isolated at the end of the Cobb, the stone jetty in
Lyme Regis, her hair blowing in the salty wind. She is a woman who con-
structed her own sexually interesting story, of betrayal, to rescue herself
from marginality, and in her mystery and allure, her outsider position, she
is as unforgettable as is Jacova Angevine. The narrator-protagonist in
Kiernan’s tale can forget nothing as he pieces together the times he has
seen and been with Angevine, her public appearance “on the old pier at
Moss on the day they launched the ROV Tiburon 11”76 and on CNN. He
is abashed that his role and skills are constructing a story of her life but he
has to try and make sense of her allure and an unimaginable reality. He
recalls both the sexy woman he loved and lost and her historical and pub-
licly remembered role as one who led what seemed like a religious cult to
their death under the sea. Piecing the story together also involves tracking
back through images of her life, and reading her father’s novels, the “unre-
markable mystery tales and potboilers.”77
Angevine’s fascination is signalled in references to both the female seller
of cockles and mussels in the folksong, and Shakespeare’s The Tempest,
where human bodily corruption is set against otherworldliness: “I close
my eyes and I see her, Jacova Angevine, the lunatic prophet from Salinas,
pearls that were her eyes, cockles and mussels, alive, alive-o.”78 She is an
eroticised fantasy memory to him, long lived, famous when he met her.
His awe is redoubled when he pieces the tales together. Her book “Waking
Leviathan” ended her career, seen as confused, “preposterous,”79 as indeed
such a tale, which breaks the bounds of safe history and realism, would be
seen. Probably her fault was producing an academic book on the topic of
undersea life rather than a potboiler like her father’s, where fiction can say
more. Further recollections of her are based on the tales she told him
including one of when, as a child, she drowned but came back to life in the
hospital, telling “some crazy story about mermaids and sea monsters and
demons, about those things trying to drag her down to the bottom of the
sea and drown her and how it wasn’t an undertow at all.”80 This offers a
clue to her adult behaviour.
He recalls Angevine with her followers in a warehouse in Monterey:
men and women in white robes are listening to every word she says. They
hang on every syllable, her every breath, their many eyes like the bulging
eyes of deep-sea fish encountering sunlight for the first time. Dazed, terri-
fied, enraptured, lost.
All of them lost.
I close my eyes and she’s leading them into the bay.

Those creatures jumped the barricades
And have headed for the sea.81
This scene reminds us of the order of Dagon, and the fishy folk emerg-
ing from and returning to the sea, flip flopping in the streets, in Lovecraft’s
“The Shadow over Innsmouth.” The tale is tangled but we piece it
together, as the narrator-protagonist does when waking “from a long
dream of storms and drowning.”82 Her book and Angevine herself spoke
of a civilisation under the sea, her father’s books talk of people walking
into the sea (Pretoria) and mermaids, gold coins, stamped with the figure
of an octopus, huge fish and someone praying to “momma Hydra.”83 The
figure of Hydra is central to Angevine’s identity and the threat she poses
not just to her drowned followers but the narrator. He talks of “Jacova’s
mother Hydra, that corrupt and bloated Madonna of the abyss, its tenta-
cles and anemone tendrils and black, bulging squid eyes, the tubeworm
proboscis snaking from one of the holes where its face should have been.”84
She is a creature straight from Lovecraft. He reconstructs the tale from his
recollection, video, TV, and newspaper clippings, acknowledging that it is
just a story, a fiction he has bought into and must edit: “Whatever remains,
that meagre sum of this profane division, that’s the bastard chimera we call
a ‘story’. I am not building but cutting away. And all stories, whether
advertised as truth or admitted falsehoods, are fictions.”85 His tale is a
“ghost story,”86 realising that Jacova has become “my ghost, my private
haunting.”87 She is likened to undersea creatures, the unknown, the time-
less, from a kind of Atlantis, since the submersible sent down to the ocean
floor recorded a stone monolith, carved, clearly a cultural artefact. He
replays a videotape over and over, raw unedited footage of the end of the
ROV Tiburon 11, which fell into an unexpected abyss under the sea, hov-
ering over the Delta stone with its carved delta sign. As he follows the
submersible’s perspective, he sees Jacova’s body on the sea bed. She seems
utterly other, but oddly, he realises, this seemingly dead body, this crea-
ture, was recorded the day before she led her followers into the sea. Like
the little mermaid, perhaps, Angevine takes her followers to another exis-
tence, and the tale of mass drowning could be no more than a cover story:
“She opens her eyes, and they are not her eyes, but the eyes of some
marine creature adapted to the perpetual night. The soulless eyes of an
anglerfish or gulper eel, eyes like matching pools of ink, and something
darts from her parted lips—.”88
226 G. WISKER
He ends on his repeated dream, inescapably locked into remembering

her. She has drawn a circle around him, but he missed the boat. He did
not go with her to the bottom of the sea and now the door to that other
world is forever shut: “the gates are shut now, they won’t open again for
you or anyone else.”89 Kiernan’s story is erotic, full of longing and loss, of
explanations mixed with research and dream, “moving between the fan-
tastic made real and the realistic, TV culture captivating us as readers with
this tale of the other, newness, longing and loss.”90
Where Lovecraft condemns, his fascination mixed with disgust at the
miscegenation caused by interbreeding with the sea creatures off
Innsmouth, laying the blame on the sexual activity of the grandmothers,
the Innsmouth greed for rich fish catches and exotic treasures, Kiernan
paints another, equally dangerous picture. “Houses Under the Sea” gives
us a different sense of the allure of such creatures through the persona and
unavoidable attraction of the marine scientist and cult leader Jacova
Angevine, her scarred shoulders indicating her fishy links. To the narrator
she resembles a mermaid who could roll him down to another world, both
captivating and threatening. Even though her eyes are dead, like a fish, she
is still eroticised, inescapable, and elemental.
She Walks in Shadows (2015)

Several women writers have taken up the challenge of engaging with
Lovecraft-inspired universes by repeating the ways in which women are
figured as crones, denigratingly undermining heritage and the purity of
the family line, coupling with the monstrous and spawning hideous crea-
tures. Others, equally culpable and vile, live amongst the normal, unaware
of the terrible legacy of the guilty, miscegenatious acts of their lascivious
grandmothers. Sean Moreland’s review captures the varied tone of She
Walks in Shadows as “synthesizing a string of discordant, haunting, har-
rowing, and sometimes also hilarious little symphonies in the key of
HPL.91”
Amelia Gorman’s “Bring the Moon to Me”92 begins as a sisterhood,
family tale in which the younger woman and her mother trade expertise in
knitting, the mother knitting sweaters for fishermen which she swears will
protect them from the threats of the sea, from the weather, from storms,
and the daughter producing computer code to help men navigate to the
moon. The imagery is comforting, domestic, but there are comparisons
between their work: “My mother turned the yarn into thick forest and
spiralling galaxies.”93 The daughter demonstrates her weaving of code, for

her mother’s comprehension, using table runners and napkin rings.
Although this is cosy, the daughter feels, “we’re changing the world.”94 As
she begins to see repeating patterns not only in the jumpers but in num-
bers in her own work, the underlying uncanny takes over from the domes-
tic. The wool of her mother’s work is “like a snake or an eel,”95 with a life
of its own and for the men who buy the jumpers, who “stumbled off,
somewhat dazed from a house smelling of lanolin and fish oil”96 they are
seen as offering some kind of spell, warding off the dangers of the sea.
Once mother and daughter have shared their similar work and the discov-
ery of the patterns, the mother tells of a different jumper with a different
kind of pattern and code a (Cthulhu) call knitted in it. Promising a fisher-
man safety with this jumper, she actually sent him to the creatures of the
deep.
She gave it to a fisherman and told him her usual marketing ploy: it would
keep him safe from all the dangers above and below the water. She lied. She
sent him out wearing a beacon that shouted at the heart of the moon. It
made him see things, he still babbles about the underwater city and the
sunken dead that drifted up from the sea bed.97
However, her plan is much greater: “even that wasn’t loud enough to
bring someone down from the sky.”98 The knitting of wool and code is a
dedicated women-driven, cosmic plot in plain view. The daughter and her
naïve co-workers weave a computer code that will more effectively call
those from beyond and, like an iteration of Alien,99 guide Astronauts to
venture out and bring back permanent change. “The Astronauts will
return but not alone, they will bring the shadow from the Moon down,
finally. It will be enormous, its landing will send out ropes as large as the
Pacific.”100 More than a shadow, it has the characteristics of the Elder
Gods and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, heralding the end of the
world: “Its hooves will trample the street lights and skyscrapers until there
is nothing but starlight. I will stand on the rocks by the bay and wrap my
sweater tightly around my shoulders, knowing that I will be the last left
standing.”101 The justification of the domestic—keeping warm with a
sweater, knitting, weaving, protection against storms at sea, with the now
terrifyingly nuanced “My work will change the world”102—nicely inter-
weaves the familiar Lovecraftian tropes with an updated, sisterly, domestic
scenario. These women are more deliberately active than the rather
228 G. WISKER
owntrodden Lavinia Whateley in “The Dunwich Horror” (1929), who

d
also has connections with the Elder Gods.
The folktale sylvan settings of “Lavinia’s Wood”103 remind readers of
tales of sirens, seductive women luring their smitten, bewitched partners
into the greenwood to turn them into creatures. But backwoods Lavinia
Whateley, odd among her extended family, avoids the abuse of her many
cousins and, like the witch maidens of folk tales, chooses the kinder, less
deformed Rist as her partner to fulfil her destiny (and affect that of man-
kind). Their tryst at her house in the woods is not quite what he expects.
Lavinia takes him to a hill top and a stone altar. As they have sex, her real
intended (monstrous, otherworldly) partner starts to come to life through
Rist, making him a traditional sacrifice to the gods, and he is left, a crum-
pled scrap of clothing without substance. This tale mixes folklore and the
Cthulhu mythos, and although we see Lavinia’s motives, she is still only a
victim and a damned vessel, in line with Lovecraft convention. She suffers
a stroke, and her own father Wizard Whateley indulges in a coarse joke
when he says “Yog-Sothoth might be the key an’ gate, but he still needs a
little help with the keyhole.” Slumped, sliced, Lavinia has no prospects for
other suitors, and her duty will be evident nine months later.
Several stories in the collection are influenced by body transfer and by
the story of Asenath Waite, whose body is possessed by her father in “The
Thing on the Doorstep” (1937). Mary Turzillo’s “When She Quickens”104
is an amusing tale of female spite and trickery in which the all-powerful
empress Ayahuasca, who after her sacrificial ritual death, normally reincar-
nates taking the body of a selected child, finds herself temporarily cor-
nered by her unfaithful partner, whose mistress will bear a child who could
inherit. Instead, she directs her migrating soul into the pacing snow leop-
ard and outwits them all. Wendy Wagner’s “Queen of a New America”105
also draws from Lovecraft’s fascination with body transfer and ancient reli-
gions, as well as his finally rather unsatisfactory writing relationship with
Harry Houdini (who died before the production of their final “jointly”
written work). The long entombed Egyptian queen Nitocris laments the
wear and tear on her tomb contents, her land of Egypt, and the mundanity
of modern America, takes a host African American child’s body, comes
close to taunting male teens, and eats a scarab beetle. The queen in the
host child body suddenly becomes aware of the new America she can bring
to being, one eventually dominated by a powerful Black female ruler.
In Molly Tanzer’s “The Thing on the Cheerleading Squad,”106 the girls
of Miskatonic High seem like god-fearing, cheerleading, pom-pom waving
American high school teens, but as Lovecraft readers we know it is danger-

ous for the lovely Veronica to come home for supper with Asenath.
Fathers’ body swapping with their daughters is a kind of spirit shift incest
in a contemporary American high school and community setting. The
horror is augmented by the social discomfort of dealing with Asenath’s
sudden unusual lesbian approaches, her role as mascot, and her withered
ageing father Ephraim coming to the practices. Veronica is caught up in
the little rituals he/Asenath have in mind and ends up a victim of a double
body swap, trapped in the body of an aged man in need of regular care.
The tale deals with sexuality and ageing, ironically undercutting ostensible
god-fearing, clean-cut family community values.
Everyday American communities are a target also in Valerie Valdes’
“Shub-Niggurath’s Witnesses,”107 in which the horned, hooved followers
of Shub-Niggurath call like doorstep Jehovah’s Witnesses, trying to attract
new believers into their cult by pointing out the pointlessness of existence
and the opportunity of a form of eternal life. Those who agree and are sold
on their message disappear into the forest, dance riotously, then become
blood sacrifices. This and several other tales in the collection capture the
horror of a threat in the seemingly everyday—school friends and their
families, religious sales folk—while several also highlight, parody, and
undercut the dangers of Lovecraft’s sexism, sexual disgust concerning
women, miscegenation, and anything that is Other.
Conclusion
Lovecraft’s influence is legion and emerges in a surprising range of horror
texts, from Dennis Wheatley’s demonic threats, sexual prurience, and eso-
teric library holdings to Buffy the vampire slayer108 and her friends’ use of
spells, more esoteric books, and tentacled horrors from the Hellmouth.
Many of the stories discussed here are aligned with Buffy’s down-to-earth
girl power, and the work of Angela Carter provides much of the critical
frame through which we can appreciate these homages, parodies, pas-
tiches, story continuations, and checks on the sexism and racism we find
in Lovecraft’s work. Carter researches, scrutinises, rewrites, parodies, and
exposes the sources of representations of women’s abjection and disem-
powerment, and in so doing she also includes and exposes the work of
Lovecraft. This she does to tell other stories, particularly ones in which
women reject the roles of puppets and pawns (The Magic Toyshop, 1967;
“The Loves of Lady Purple,” 1974; Nights at the Circus, 1987), seizing
230 G. WISKER
their sexuality and offering ways of revising and rewriting received, con-
straining myths. Angela Carter’s criticism of the obscure grandiosity of
Lovecraft’s mythos and abstract horrors is played out in many of the tales
in the collection by women writers, She Walks in Shadows. Like Carter’s
work, particularly parts of Nights at the Circus (1987), these are serious
and amusing parodies of Lovecraft’s repressed sexual responses, his fears
and loathing of women, sex, and foreign others, and they also bring ver-
sions of insidious, cosmic, bodily horror into the commonplace, the
domestic, and the local. Despite his esoteric references, Lovecraft troubles
the reader with unnervingly everyday insecurities, for the naïve traveller,
or the curious researcher, the threat of the behaviour of the unknown local
people and places, powerful knowledge in obscure books, a disturbing of
the notionally domestic for the tenant taking over a room with a history,
the student in lodgings with a strange landlady.
She Walks in Shadows engages with Lovecraft’s mythos and his tales’
disgusted fascination with sex, race, otherness, transposing the issues to
modern day America. Stories here take the twists and turns of familiar
tales, the body swaps, the power games, the esoteric religions and their
power, the books, spiritual and mystical oppressions, and transitions. As
with the work of Angela Carter, they often both use parody and comment
on contemporary issues—spite, family tension, violence, incest, power
games. These new stories are replete with powerful, wry, imaginative
women who refuse to be sacrificial victims, cult figures destroyed for their
power, hags, sources of inherited problems, and disgusting terrors.
Instead, many of them are intelligent, and able to body-swap to their own
needs, fly, or swim free, empowered.
Lovecraft’s ineffable, noxious, vengeful, terrifying, nameless horrors
and his disgust at Otherness, the foreign, the disabled, and the female are
the sources for the lurking evil or threat in the work of Kiernan, Carter,
and the women writing in She Walks in Shadows. The cult and sexual fasci-
nation of Kiernan’s Jacova Angevine are all too familiar in our contempo-
rary world, and while Carter parodies the deification and sacrifice of
women in Nights at the Circus,109 each reveals the fascination, sexual fris-
sons, and threat of Lovecraft’s versions, making the weird palpable and
credible. On the one hand, all the tales discussed here pay a form of hom-
age to Lovecraft’s cosmic threats and the everyday terror of obscure hor-
rors. On the other hand, women in Carter, Kiernan, and several of the
contemporary tales each speak back to Lovecraft’s sexual fear and disgust,
exposing deep-seated problems with gender and power and, in Carter’s
case, among others, giving sexually energetic women the last laugh.
Notes
1. H.P. Lovecraft, “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” in At the Mountains
of Madness: The Definitive Edition (New York: The Modern Library,
[1927], 2005), 103–182.
2. Neil Gaiman, “Shoggoth’s Old Peculiar,” in The Mammoth Book of Comic
Fantasy, ed. Mike Ashley (London: Robinson Publishing, 1998).
3. Neil Gaiman, Only the End of the World Again (Portland, OR: Oni Press,
2000).
4. Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Paula R Stiles, She Walks in Shadows, eds. Silvia
Moreno-Garcia and Paula R. Stiles (Vancouver, BC: Innsmouth Free
Press, 2015).
5. Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1991).
6. Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus (London: Chatto and Windus, 1987).
7. Mary Turzillo, “When She Quickens,” in She Walks in Shadows, eds. Silvia
Press, 2015).
8. Wendy N. Wagner, “Queen of a New America,” in She Walks in Shadows,
eds. Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Paula R. Stiles (Vancouver, BC: Innsmouth
Free Press, 2015).
9. Moreno-Garcia and Stiles, She Walks in Shadows.
10. H.P. Lovecraft, “Medusa’s Coil,” with Zealia Bishop, in Weird Tales 33,
no. 1 (1939).
11. H.P. Lovecraft, “The Dreams in the Witch House” [1932], in “The
Lurking Fear” and Other Stories (London: Panther, 1970).
12. H.P. Lovecraft, “The Dunwich Horror” [1929], in “The Lurking Fear”
and Other Stories (London: Panther, 1970).
13. Lovecraft, “The Shadow.”
14. Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto (London: William Bathoe and
Thomas Lownds, 1764).
15. Charles Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer (Edinburgh: Archibald,
Constable and Company, 1820).
16. Arthur Machen, “The Novel of the Black Seal,” in The Three Impostors
(London: The Bodley Head, 1895).
17. Arthur Machen, “The White People,” Horlick’s Magazine (London: J &
W Horlick’s, 1904).
18. Bram Stoker, Dracula (London: Penguin Books, [1897], 1979).
19. Joyce Carol Oates, “The King of Weird,” The New York Review of Books
43 (17) (October 31, 1996), http://www.readability.com/articles/sbc-
qmkct, date accessed February 15, 2009.
20. Oates, “The King of Weird.”
232 G. WISKER

22. Gina Wisker, “Spawn of the Pit: Lavinia, Marceline, Medusa and All
Things Foul: HP Lovecraft’s Liminal Women,” in New Critical Essays on
H.P. Lovecraft, David Simmons, ed. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2013), 31–54.
23. Frank Belknap Long, Howard Phillips Lovecraft: Dreamer on the Night
Side (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1975).
24. Sunand Tryambak Joshi, H.P. Lovecraft: A Life (West Warwick, RI:
Necronomicon Press, 2001).
25. Lord online.
26. H.P. Lovecraft, Selected Letters Vol. I, eds. A. Derleth and D. Wandrei,
(Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1965), 315.
27. H.P. Lovecraft, in Joshi H.P. Lovecraft: A Life, 30.
28. Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-
siècle Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).
29. H.P. Lovecraft, “Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His
Family,” in The Wolverine, 1921.
31. Lovecraft, “The Dunwich Horror.”
32. Lovecraft, “The Dreams in the Witch House.”
33. H.P. Lovecraft, “The Colour Out of Space,” in Amazing Stories,
September, 1927.
34. H.P. Lovecraft, “The Rats in the Walls” [1924], in “The Lurking Fear”
and Other Stories (London: Panther, 1970).
35. H.P. Lovecraft, “The Curse of Yig,” with Zealia Bishop, in Weird Tales,
14, no. 5 (1929), 625–36.
36. Lovecraft, “The Rats in the Walls.”
37. H.P. Lovecraft, “The Thing on the Doorstep,” in Weird Tales, January,
1937.
38. Moreno-Garcia and Stiles, She Walks in Shadows.
39. H.P. Lovecraft, “The Last Test,” with Adolphe de Castro, in Weird Tales,
12, no. 5 (1928).
40. Lovecraft, “The Curse of Yig.”
41. Lovecraft, “Medusa’s Coil,” with Zealia Bishop.
42. Lovecraft, “Medusa’s Coil,” with Zealia Bishop.
43. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (London: Ward, Lock and Co.,
1891).
44. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (Paris: Gallimard, 1949).
45. Barbara Creed, The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism and Psychoanalysis
(London: Routledge, 1993).
46. Silvia Moreno-Garcia, “Magna Mater: Women and Eugenic Thought in
the Work of H P Lovecraft,” MA thesis UBC (2016), 17.
47. Lovecraft, “The Dunwich Horror.”

48. Lovecraft, “Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn.”
50. Angela Carter, Shaking a Leg: Collected Journalism and Writings (London:
Vintage, [1968], 1998), 443–447.
51. Lovecraft, “The Shadow,” 26.
52. Lovecraft, “The Shadow,” 28–9.
53. Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves.
54. Lovecraft, “The Shadow,” 29.
56. Angela Carter, “The Loves of Lady Purple,” in Wayward Girls and
Wicked Women (London: Virago, [1974], 1986).
57. Angela Carter, The Magic Toyshop (London: Virago Press Limited,
[1967], 1981).
58. Carter, Nights at the Circus.
59. Moreno-Garcia and Stiles, She Walks in Shadows, 1.
60. Angela Carter, “Notes from the Front Line,” in On Gender and Writing,
ed. M. Wandor (London: Pandora, 1983), 70, 71.
61. Carter, Shaking a Leg, 443–447.
63. Carter, Nights at the Circus, 75.
69. Carter, Shaking a Leg, 444.
72. Caitlín R. Kiernan, “Houses Under the Sea,” in Lovecraft Unbound, ed.
Ellen Datlow (Milwaukee: Dark Horse Books, [2003], 2009), 161–94.
73. Ellen Datlow, 2009, 10.
74. Caitlín R. Kiernan quoted in Matt Staggs, “Happy Birthday H.P. Lovecraft:
Authors and Editors on His Legacy,” August 20, 2010. http://suvudu.
com/2010/08/happy-birthday-h-p-lovecraft-authors-and-editors-on-
his-legacy.html.
75. John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman (London: Jonathan Cape,
1969).
76. Kiernan, “Houses Under the Sea,” 162.
234 G. WISKER

90. Joe Nazare, 2010. “Anatomy of the Weird Tale: Caitlín Kiernan” at
http://www.macabre-republic.com/2010/09/anatomy-of-weird-tale-
caitlin-r.html.
91. Sean Moreland, “Review of She Walks in Shadows and Aickman’s Heirs,”
https://pstdarkness.com/2015/10/30/pstd-book-review-she-walks-
in-shadows-and-aickmans-heirs/.
92. Amelia Gorman, “Bring the Moon to Me,” in She Walks in Shadows, eds.
Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Paula R. Stiles (Vancouver, BC: Innsmouth
Free Press, 2015).
93. Gorman, “Bring the Moon to Me,” 31.
99. Ridley Scott, Alien, 1979.
103. Angela Slatter, “Lavinia’s Wood,” in She Walks in Shadows, eds. Silvia
Press, 2015).
104. Turzillo, “When She Quickens.”
105. Wagner, “Queen of a New America.”
106. Molly Tanzer, “The Thing on the Cheerleading Squad,” in She Walks in
Shadows, eds. Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Paula R. Stiles (Vancouver, BC:
Innsmouth Free Press, 2015).
107. Valerie Valdes, “Shub-Niggurath’s Witnesses,” in She Walks in Shadows,
eds. Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Paula R. Stiles (Vancouver, BC: Innsmouth
Free Press, 2015).
108. Joss Whedon, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 1997–2003.
CHAPTER 12
Weird Cinema and the Aesthetics of Dread
Brian R. Hauser
One of the most fascinating aspects of the poetics of the weird H. P. Lovecraft
lays out at the beginning of Supernatural Horror in Literature (hereafter
SHL) is that it makes no explicit reference to narrative medium. It is clear
from what follows therein (and, of course, from the title of the essay) that
Lovecraft is primarily concerned with literature, but his discussion can apply
equally well to any artistic medium with the capacity to deliver the all-
important sensation of dread with a seriousness of tone and at least a hint of
the supernatural. However, narrative is arguably not a necessary precondi-
tion for the weird. We can imagine a painter fulfilling Lovecraft’s criteria in
a darkened scene, populated by figures who peer apprehensively into the
shadows that gather in the corners of the frame where lurks we know not
what doom. If it is rendered with the same seriousness as a scene by Francisco
Goya or Henry Fuseli and also depicts or at least hints at supernatural phe-
nomena, then we could confidently assert that this painting evokes the
weird in the way that Lovecraft understood it. In fact, one of Lovecraft’s
narrators says as much in “Pickman’s Model”:
Any magazine-cover hack can splash paint around wildly and call it a night-
mare or a Witches’ Sabbath or a portrait of the devil, but only a great painter
can make such a thing really scare or ring true. That’s because only a real
B. R. Hauser (*)
Humanities and Social Sciences, Clarkson University, Potsdam, NY, USA

236 B. R. HAUSER
artist knows the actual anatomy of the terrible or the physiology of fear—the
exact sorts of lines and proportions that connect up with latent instincts or
hereditary memories of fright, and the proper colour contrasts and lighting
effects to stir the dormant sense of strangeness. I don’t have to tell you why
a Fuseli really brings a shiver while a cheap ghost-story frontispiece merely
makes us laugh. There’s something those fellows catch—beyond life—that
they’re able to make us catch for a second.1
In a similar vein, Caetlin Benson-Allott points out the ways in which visual
artists can create “zones of horror” though the depiction of weird space
such as Ron Cobb’s and H. R. Giger’s set designs in Alien (1979) and Lee
Bontecou’s mid-century wall sculptures.2 The moment of strangeness that
a truly frightening work of art can convey is perhaps more sustainable if it
is woven into narrative, and certainly this is the mission to which Lovecraft
dedicated his literary life. This application of the weird to literary narrative
is no less valid in the case of motion pictures. In this essay, I briefly survey
how the weird is usually discussed with reference to film and then explain
what I mean by the cinematic weird with particular attention to the debt
my concept of it owes to SHL. My discussion of the cinematic weird will
include some detail about the aesthetic and formal aspects of weird cinema
(cinematography, mise-en-scène, editing, etc.) before embarking upon an
analysis of the aesthetics of dread in several examples of weird cinema.
Horror, the Literary Weird, and the “Lovecraftian”

We may view it as strange that very few commentators have ventured to
discuss weird cinema using Lovecraft’s own criteria and none at any sig-
nificant length. Lovecraft is rightly viewed as singularly influential in hor-
ror fiction of the twentieth century, and much of that influence derives
from his articulation in SHL of a weird tradition in Anglo-American litera-
ture. However, most discussions of weird cinema come in one or more of
four overlapping contexts. First, these films are most often lumped in with
the much larger category of horror films, and while it is certainly the case
that weird films are fear films, it also remains true that the weird does
something different than what we often find in horror more broadly
defined. “Horror films,” as a category, form a large tent. Films as diverse
as Nosferatu: or, Symphony of Horror (1922), House of 1000 Corpses (2003),
Eyes Without a Face (1960), The Entity (1982), and Zombeavers (2014)
WEIRD CINEMA AND THE AESTHETICS OF DREAD 237
find their way into the horror category. These films all traffic more or less
in the evocation of fear as part of filmic entertainment; however, their
extreme diversity of style, technique, and tone prohibits speaking about
further commonalities. When a category contains such varied examples, its
primary usefulness is in danger of becoming a mere recognition of that
diversity and little else.3 In addition, categorizing weird films as horror
tends to exclude those weird films that partake more heavily of other rec-
ognizable genres such as science fiction or neo-noir, as in the cases of
Ridley Scott’s Prometheus (2012) and Angel Heart (1987).
Another general grouping recognizes the fact that many weird films are
more or less direct adaptations of weird literature. The first direct adapta-
tion of a Lovecraft story came in 1960. Fernando Cortés’s La Marca del
Muerto, a Mexican adaptation of The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (though
unmarked as such), was subsequently extensively recut and released in the
USA in 1965 as Creature of the Walking Dead.4 Even before that, film-
makers adapted tales by Edgar Allan Poe, Algernon Blackwood, and other
greats, and since then there have been a flood of adaptations based on
source material by authors of the weird.5 In turn, cinematic adaptation has
spawned a rich critical literature, and for decades this literature was tied to
the central question of fidelity, leaving cinema in a de facto subordinate
role to its source texts.6 The issue for critics of Lovecraft adaptations, then,
has long been whether or not individual films can faithfully translate
Lovecraft’s tales to the screen. The general consensus among many fans
tends to be that Lovecraft’s tales are “unfilmable,” that the suchness of
them is locked in prose and lyric. In this vein, S. T. Joshi points out in his
preface to Lurker in the Lobby, “in a sense that is true, if one assumes that
such an adaptation should mechanically seek to duplicate the effect of the
written word on the screen. Such an undertaking is futile from the start.”7
To be fair, readers tend on the whole to be unsatisfied with cinematic
adaptations, and perhaps this is the case for the very same reasons Joshi
outlines above. Lovecraft is not special in this way. And yet, we can easily
point to larger cultural shifts in the consumption of entertainment that
make film adaptations a good business decision. Movie distributors have
long understood that adaptations potentially reach much wider audiences
than print-based source material.8 If a readership is quite broad and profit-
able (Harry Potter, The Hunger Games, Marvel comics), adapting novels
or comic books into cinema often makes clear commercial sense, even
when those adaptations are merely misguided attempts at mechanical
duplication. But as Lovecraft himself points out in SHL, “The appeal of
238 B. R. HAUSER
the spectrally macabre is generally narrow,”9 and this narrow appeal has
not quickened the pulse of film distributors. Big-budget adaptations of
Lovecraft’s works remain elusive.10
Many other discussions of weird cinema, particularly among the online
community, hinge on the application of the adjective “Lovecraftian” to
certain films. These discussions are often especially frustrating, because the
ubiquitous but varied use of a term guarantees a forbidding level of confu-
sion and disagreement.11 When someone describes a film as “Lovecraftian,”
she might only mean that it includes recognizable elements of plot, char-
acter, objects, or settings from actual stories by Lovecraft (e.g., the dreaded
Necronomicon, Miskatonic University, Arkham, Cthulhu, etc.). We can
include in this meaning the pernicious view that the mere presence of a
tentacle makes something Lovecraftian. Another commentator might use
Lovecraftian to mean evocative of Lovecraft’s style or mood, perhaps a
focus on shadowy extraterrestrial horrors, a morbid fear of aquatic mon-
sters, the dread of rural degeneration and urban miscegenation, as well as
a general eschewing of overt sexuality. Alternatively, Lovecraftian might
stand in for the term “cosmic horror,” including the tendency for some of
Lovecraft’s narrators to go insane at the ultimate realization of human
insignificance in the cosmos. All of these meanings limit the weird to its
manifestations in Lovecraft’s own tales, which leaves out a tremendous
amount of material. In addition, it is important to note, as Joshi has on
more than one occasion, that not all of Lovecraft’s tales are masterpieces
of the weird.12 In SHL, Lovecraft sets out criteria for the weird tale that
many of his own stories fulfill, but he also praises work by other authors
who manifest the weird in ways that his fiction and poetry never would. To
limit a conception of the weird to “like Lovecraft” is unnecessarily
anemic.
Finally, Mark Fisher offers a new and interesting way to think about the
weird in his slim 2016 extended essay The Weird and the Eerie. For Fisher,
the weird treats the irruption of some outside force or entity into our real-
ity. It is the presence of something that should not be present. “It involves
a sensation of wrongness: a weird entity or object is so strange that it makes
us feel that it should not exist, or at least it should not exist here. Yet if the
entity or object is here, then the categories which we have up until now
used to make sense of the world cannot be valid.”13 Fisher analyzes a range
of cultural objects through the lens of this definition of the weird from
literature to music to motion pictures, including Rainer Werner
Fassbinder’s television movie Welt am Draht (World on a Wire, 1972) and
David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001) and Inland Empire (2006).

Fisher’s weird offers a new way to think about the weird as distinct from
what he calls the eerie: “The eerie, by contrast, is constituted by a failure
of absence or by a failure of presence. The sensation of the eerie occurs
either when there is something present where there should be nothing, or
is [sic] there is nothing present when there should be something.”14 Due
to this focus on presence and absence, Fisher points out that, “the sensa-
tion of the eerie clings to certain kinds of physical spaces and landscapes.”15
Perhaps as a result, Fisher spends more of his time in this second half of
the essay treating eerie films and television shows compared to the section
on the weird. In previous criticism involving the weird, including SHL,
Fisher’s separate aesthetic effects would both fall under the umbrella of
the weird.
These different ways of understanding weird cinema each come with
clear benefits. Speaking in terms of horror films allows us to view these
films in a wider context, drawing into sharper focus those qualities that
appear common across the horror genre. Treating cinematic adaptations
of individual weird tales allows us to interrogate issues of influence and
medium-specific techniques and effects. Using a term like “Lovecraftian”
can help us to focus our discussion of influence (when that focus is neces-
sary). Finally, Mark Fisher’s intervention into the aesthetic experience of
the weird offers a potential new and narrower path to explore how these
narratives work. These benefits are real and have their uses. However, I
argue that stepping back and using Lovecraft’s own criteria for the weird
will show us things about weird cinema that we may not have seen before.
In short, weird cinema has already been with us for a long time, it is
generically and thematically diverse, and it is quite often of extremely high
quality.
Weird Cinema
Before I set about discussing weird cinema in more depth, we must first
remind ourselves of Lovecraft’s own definition of the weird from SHL:
The true weird tale has something more than secret murder, bloody bones,
or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule. A certain atmosphere of
breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be pres-
ent; and there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentous-
ness becoming its subject, of that most terrible conception of the human
240 B. R. HAUSER
brain—a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of

Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the
demons of unplumbed space. (28; emphasis added)
Lovecraft proceeds to discuss at great length aspects of certain tales that

distract or disqualify from the weird, which I will address in a later section
of the essay. For now, I want to highlight the three necessary components
of the weird: dread, the supernatural, and seriousness. The overall atmo-
sphere in the story should be one of dread, and this runs counter to per-
haps a more popular (and admittedly more financially successful) formula
that emphasizes graphic horror and startle effects. Dread is the general-
ized apprehensiveness produced by the anticipation of some as-yet-unseen
doom. Dread is quiet, slow, and inexorable (and we can probably all agree
that quiet, slow, and inexorable do not make a blockbuster). The situation
or entity that is the source of this dread should not be immediately grasp-
able or understandable according to known laws of the universe. This is a
crucial valence that is not immediately clear in the essay’s title. For
Lovecraft, the supernatural is “more than secret murder, bloody bones, or
a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule.” It is the “according to
rule” part that dissatisfies Lovecraft here. In the essay’s chapter on
M.R. James, Lovecraft heaps praise on James’s masterful tales of ghosts,
and one of these ghosts actually does appear as a sheeted form!16 But
James’s tales are by and large sui generis. The mere presence of ghosts,
vampires, or other monster types in a tale is insufficient to make that tale
weird. What Lovecraft is getting at in his definition is that the supernatural
quality of the formulaic monster is too insubstantial to evoke sufficient
dread in the audience. The audience has grown comfortable with these
stock characters. In fact, now that there are so many examples of the for-
mulaic monsters out there, the artist must work extra-hard if she wants her
ghost or vampires or werewolves to evoke the kind of cognitive dissonance
that characterizes the weird. Lastly, the weird tale should present its sub-
ject in all seriousness. This is not to say that the author believes in the
actual existence of the dreaded malevolence. It simply means that the tale
is told without reduction to allegory and without recourse to comedy as
an emotional safety valve or to postmodern irony as self-aware commen-
tary. The psychological distance created by these non-serious stances
effectively defuses any attempt to manufacture dread, disqualifying it as
weird.17 From these three criteria, we can see that the true weird film will
be quite likely unremitting in its doom and gloom. Even the most cursory
survey of titles considered among the greatest of weird fiction will uncover
relatively few tales that are anything other than bleak and relentless parades
of dread.18
Weird cinema is a kind of fear narrative, as I have already discussed, but
it is not the same kind of fear narrative as horror. Horror films have been
theorized in a number of ways over the past three decades, including in
Julia Kristeva’s psychoanalytic treatise Powers of Horror (1980).
Contributions to horror scholarship like Kristeva’s are profound and
instrumental; however, they operate on a somewhat different plane than
Lovecraft’s SHL, which is where I would like to keep this conversation, as
my argument is less about what weird cinema means and more about how
it delivers its effects. SHL offers an aesthetics of the weird, and a number
of philosophers have engaged in similar projects with regard to the wider
subject of horror, perhaps most influentially in horror studies by Noël
Carroll in his 1990 monograph Philosophy of Horror, or Paradoxes of the
Heart. For Carroll, horror is “entity-based,” focused on monsters that are
both physically threatening as well as somehow impure. Their impurity—
the result of category violations—evokes disgust in both characters and
the audience.19 It is this combination of fear and disgust that characterizes
horror for Carroll. However, as Lovecraft points out over 60 years before,
his concept of the weird is not simply a matter of gruesome horrors. It is
the atmosphere of otherworldly dread that provides the central fear motif
in weird narrative. Carroll does touch on the idea of dread briefly, identify-
ing dread as the operative emotive response to strange and unsettling
events rather than monstrous entities, and recognizing that dread requires
a theory of its own before setting it aside as a digression from his argu-
ment.20 However, theorizing dread as event-based misses the mark. It is a
definition that fits in with Carroll’s model, but it fits less well with super-
natural horror as we find it in actual weird fiction and films.
Cynthia Freeland takes up Carroll’s suggestion that dread get its own
theory in her 2004 essay, “Horror and Art-Dread.” In this essay, Freeland
characterizes dread as “on ongoing fear of imminent threat from some-
thing deeply unnerving and evil, yet not well-defined or well-under-
stood.”21 Unlike Carroll’s horror, the object of dread is distant and
obscure, and though it engenders fear, the nature of the threat is deeply
uncertain. The obscurity of the fearful agent is precisely the quality that
makes weird cinema less common than other kinds of horror films. The
scopophilic pleasures of cinema more broadly tend toward the eventual
reveal of the monster, whatever it may be. However, dread often proceeds
242 B. R. HAUSER
precisely by withholding this revelation. The monster, if there even is one,

remains off screen, and the audience is only ever made aware of its pres-
ence by implication. Though cinema has a long history of success with
various forms of suspense, producers and filmmakers often feel the need to
reward the audience’s patience with the eventual release of built-up ten-
sion. In weird cinema, the tension of unanswered questions is often never
fully released. On the one hand, this lack of release can be (and I think
most often is) characterized as a failure of art; the narrative is seen as too
obscure. On the other hand, the successful weird film most likely leaves a
much more indelible mark on its audience precisely because it asks ques-
tions that it then refuses to answer fully. These questions and the tensions
surrounding their resolution linger long after the credits have rolled and
the house lights have come up. Hollywood narrative film is usually digest-
ible within its run time; it offers a discrete entertainment that may not
repay multiple viewings. Weird cinema is far more likely to open its audi-
ence up to uncertainty and then leave them open.
Additionally, dread is associated with a particularly profound (i.e., phil-
osophical or existential) uncertainty. In fact, as Freeland points out in a
passage that echoes Lovecraft’s own claims in SHL:
existentialists regarded dread as a kind of philosophical emotion, a funda-

mental response to aspects of our human condition…In both movies and
life, dread may also be existential, registering fear not of some malign agents
but of precisely the reverse—that the world has no ruling agents and that we
humans are alone in a world that fails to satisfy our expectations for purpose,
meaning, and justice.22
This close association with the abstract and distant threat instead of the
concrete and immediate threat is, I think, the fundamental difference
between most previous conceptions of horror and the weird. Julian Hanich
offers perhaps the most direct and nuanced explanation of cinematic dread
in his Cinematic Emotions in Horror Films and Thrillers. Regarding dread,
he writes, “Dread is an intense but quiet anticipatory kind of cinematic
fear in which we both feel for the endangered character and fearfully expect
a threatening outcome that promises to be shocking and/or horrifying to
us. Dread lasts until it gives way to shock or horror or disappears other-
wise, but it does not include those other effects.”23 Crucially in this
instance, the intentionality of fear is split in two directions, instead of
merely one as with the monsters of horror. There is a “concentration
section” around which “fear condenses,” and it is this concentration sec-

tion that seems to evoke the fear. However, this first prong is actually caus-
ally linked to what Hanich calls the “anchoring point.”24 For instance, in
John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982), it is not the immediate danger of the
disgusting monstrosity that accounts for the aesthetic effect of dread. That
effect comes about as a result of the audience’s consideration of the impli-
cations of the obscure threat. The fear engendered by the various d isgusting
manifestations of the alien in The Thing (one example of the concentration
section, in this case) is a pale and fleeting emotion compared to the deeply
unsettling conclusions one must draw when one considers Blair’s com-
puter modeling of a global infestation alongside the alien’s ability to mimic
other life-forms (the film’s ultimate anchor point). The dread we feel
regarding these conclusions is made all the more powerful by the film’s
serious tone.
Lovecraft reminds us in SHL that it is not simply the atmosphere of
dread that defines the weird, it is also at least a hint of the supernatural as
well as a seriousness of tone that combines to deliver the effect of the
weird. Both of these qualities are perhaps best understood as negative
requirements. The supernatural is anything that exceeds or otherwise vio-
lates our current understanding of the fixed laws of the universe, and
therefore it excludes a significant number of entries into the wider horror
genre of the past several decades. Horror films featuring serial killers or
“torture porn” or wild animals generally would not qualify. Likewise, con-
tagious diseases are also within our conception of the way the world works,
so virulent epidemics are also not weird, unless their symptoms (e.g., zom-
biism) are somehow supernatural. For this quality to be fulfilled, the dead
must walk, the immaterial must be present, time and space must cease to
function in their accustomed fashion.25 It is important to point out here
that a wide variety of supernatural monsters are familiar to the general
filmgoer, just as they were familiar to Lovecraft’s readers. The mere for-
mulaic presence of the supernatural is not adequate to the weird; there is
also the requirement that the tale must be, “expressed with a seriousness
and portentousness becoming its subject.” The characteristic of serious-
ness is directly associated with the sense that the weird always entails an
encounter with the profoundly strange. This profundity demands not
belief, but rather the lack of mirth, ironic distance, and allegorical dis-
placement. Many horror films contain more than a hint of campiness,
wisecracks, and laugh-out-loud situations. An American Werewolf in
London (1981), Re-Animator (1985), Frighteners (1996), and Zombeavers
244 B. R. HAUSER
(2014) all add comedy to their orchestra of techniques, frequently employ-

ing humor as an emotional safety valve, a counterpoint to the jump scares
and the fountains of blood. Likewise, postmodern horror cinema’s
tendency to establish ironic distance between viewers and narratives under-
cuts what might otherwise evoke the weird, such as in horror films like Wes
Craven’s New Nightmare (1994), Shaun of the Dead (2004), and Cabin in
the Woods (2012). As one might suspect by this point, films that feature the
supernatural, an atmosphere of profound dread, and a seriousness of tone
do not make up the majority of horror films and never have. The weird as
a mode does not enjoy mass popularity, as Lovecraft knew in 1927.
The Aesthetics of Dread

As Freeland rightly points out in her essay, the evocation of art-dread relies
on more than the simple unfolding of plot and story; art-dread is also
generated through the deft use of all available elements of cinematic style:
“Other cinematic features play a part in making the thought of something
dreadful out there seem real and gripping, yet also unspecified and vague.
In movies, imagery, lighting, editing, sound, music, acting, and the like
must work together to sustain the sense of fear and uncertain suspense so
crucial to dread.”26 The weird does not have a signature aesthetic style in
the way that film noir or musical comedies have identifiable aesthetics
from which individual films of that kind rarely deviate. In fact, since the
weird is more accurately described as a mode rather than a genre per se,
individual weird films often take some of their aesthetic cues from one or
more genres relevant to the storyline, modifying them as necessary to
generate art-dread. For instance, fake documentaries like The Blair Witch
Project (1999), Lake Mungo (2008), and Final Prayer (2014) make exten-
sive and explicit use of cinéma vérité techniques such as handheld camera
(often of lower image quality than the audience would expect of a feature
film), available lighting, and location sound, along with other documen-
tary techniques such as (real or fake) file footage, staged talking-head
interviews, and on-screen graphics to enhance or assist in the audience’s
willing suspension of disbelief. The filmmakers do their best to make it
easy for the audience to watch the film as if it were a real documentary; this
is the fake documentary’s primary method of ensuring the necessary seri-
ousness to achieve the weird. These films then present the audience with a
story that combines the dread of some obscure force with a seemingly
believable claim that the world does not work in the way we thought.
Blair Witch presents the viewer with fundamental warps of both time and
space without ever revealing a visible monster or supernatural agent.
Similarly, Lake Mungo manages to be unsettling by focusing its energy on
convincing the audience that there is real dread in the mere fact that ghosts
might exist, even if those ghosts do not pose a direct threat to the charac-
ters in the film. And Final Prayer uses the tension between characters over
whether or not anything supernatural is happening at all in order to build
suspense, right up to the last few devastating minutes of the film, which
only hint at the profoundly weird truth. Aesthetically, all three of these
films draw heavily from documentary styles to lure the audience into an
experience increasingly characterized by art-dread and the unreal, deliver-
ing a film with all the seriousness, profound dread, and the supernatural
that one expects from the weird.
In “Horror and Art-Dread,” Freeland briefly discusses the aesthetics of
dread in the examples of Blair Witch, The Sixth Sense, and Signs as exam-
ples of “dreadful places,” “dread-inspiring people,” and “apocalyptic
visions,” respectively. My own research into weird cinema has borne out
the usefulness of these three categories. For instance, I would add films
like Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) and The Haunting (1963) to “dread-
ful places,” and The Last Wave (1977) and The Last Winter (2006) to
“apocalyptic visions.” However, I have also found a number of weird films
that express different kinds of thematic concerns, and so to Freeland’s apt
thematic groups I will add “demonic dread” and “dreadful fates,” by
offering brief aesthetic analyses of Angel Heart (1987) and It Follows
(2014).
Alan Parker’s Angel Heart offers a classic encounter with demonic
dread. In some weird films of demonic dread, like The Exorcist (1972), the
demon (sometimes even Satan) possesses one or more characters and
thereby seeks to influence the world for evil. However, other weird films,
like Angel Heart, offer the devil as a visible and present character, thus
displacing the source of dread from Lucifer himself onto a more diffuse
sense of spiritual accountability, over which the devil has a sort of bureau-
cratic authority. This locus of dread surrounding the power of spiritual
figures and their actions resonates with H. P. Lovecraft’s own observation
in SHL that, “there is here involved a psychological pattern or tradition as
real and as deeply grounded in mental experience as any other pattern of
mankind; coeval with the religious feeling and closely related to many
aspects of it.” (28) That is to say, the awe in which people hold the divine
as a power from outside of this world is similar in many ways to the dread
246 B. R. HAUSER
they might feel concerning outside, otherworldly forces. Weird films of

this second variety are often focused on charming devils and usually fea-
ture Faustian bargains and their inevitable infernal results. Parker’s film is
one of these.
Angel Heart is a gorgeous neo-noir adaptation of William Hjortsberg’s
1978 novel, Falling Angel. In the film, a mysterious businessman named
Louis Cyphre (Robert DeNiro) hires a low-rent private detective named
Harry Angel (Mickey Rourke) to track down a famous prewar crooner
named Johnny Favorite. The singer owes the businessman unspecified col-
lateral in return for assistance with his career in show business, and Mr.
Cyphre would like to collect. While the audience of the film is expected to
see from the beginning that Louis Cyphre is actually Lucifer, Rourke plays
Angel as essentially clueless about the identity of his employer. This is
perhaps the one continuous element of dramatic irony in the film, in which
the audience knows more than Harry Angel. In most instances, Angel
Heart builds suspense by keeping us in precisely the same position as
Harry with regard to story knowledge. Harry follows up on a few leads in
New York, but his investigation quickly leads him down to New Orleans
and the world of voodoo, where he meets a number of voodoo practitio-
ners including the young and beautiful Epiphany Proudfoot (Lisa Bonet),
daughter of Johnny Favorite.
The particularly tricky form of dread that Angel Heart must pull off is
to make the revelations concerning the overall mystery and Angel’s char-
acter both surprising and inevitable. The solution must bring both the
pleasure of knowledge as well as the dread of truth. In order to do this, the
audience should be made to “know without knowing.” This means that
the audience acquires clues both through the unfolding of the narrative
but also through various less-obvious stylistic elements like editing and
mise-en-scène.27 For instance, Angel Heart used what appears to be the
standard elliptical editing style of Hollywood continuity editing to hide
crucial events and information from the audience. As Harry Angel pursues
his investigation, most of the major witnesses in his interviews are viciously
murdered shortly after he speaks with them. As Harry learns of these mur-
ders, both he and the audience feel as though an obscure but lethal agent
is drawing ever closer to him. Only later in the film do we learn (along
with Harry) that he is responsible for every one of these murders. What
seemed like a simple cut away from a scene actually becomes the veil of
self-deception that allows Harry Angel to maintain the fiction of his iden-
tity to himself, as well as to others.
Angel Heart also manages to show us images that mean little to us at

the time but later on take on much more profound significance.
Throughout the film, the audience is presented with the image motif of
bladed fans, either stalled or in lazy motion. There are fans in the restau-
rant where Angel meets Cyphre and fans in the bar where Angel talks to
Toots Sweet, the musician. More significantly, throughout the film the
audience is shown a mysterious sequence of inserts that have the character
of an odd flashback or repeated nightmare. We see a wide shot of a
New York apartment building, before we cut to a closer shot of a window
with a vent fan. Faded red curtains on the window betray an illumination
from within the room, and we hear a heart-rending scream. Only near the
very end of the film do we know what happened in the room behind that
window with the vent fan, and only then do we realize that all of the fans
in scenes with Harry throughout the film are “reminding” us of some-
thing that we do not know and that Harry does not remember. This paral-
lel effect on character and audience comes together at the same time, so
that the point at which the audience has enough information to know
what has happened before the action of the film is precisely the same point
at which Harry remembers. The pleasure of the solution and the horror at
its implications mix inextricably for both Harry and the audience. This is
a tremendously effective strategy for Parker, and it is made all the more
powerful by the deft use of imagery and elliptical editing.
Parker employs both the mise-en-scène and editing in Angel Heart not
simply to show the audience the power of the devil but to make the audi-
ence feel that power. One of the results of Johnny Favorite’s infernal pact
is a profound self-deception. Parker manages to put the audience in a
sympathetic relationship with Harry Angel as the film’s protagonist and
then slowly make the audience feel as though the hand of the devil is draw-
ing closer and closer to him all the time. To get the audience to feel the
profound power of this particular Faustian tale is what separates it from
horror cinema more broadly. There are shocking and gory moments in the
film, and there are two scenes in which characters are shown with demonic,
yellow eyes. This is as close as Parker brings us to showing an obvious
supernatural monster of any kind. When Louis Cyphre does appear on
screen, he is quite charming. It is Cyphre’s power that we come to dread,
and that is the power that helps make the film truly weird.
An equally effective but aesthetically quite different strategy is on dis-
play in David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows. In the film, a young woman
named Jay (Maika Monroe) is pursued by a deadly supernatural entity
248 B. R. HAUSER
after she “catches it” by having sex with a young man named Hugh (Jake
Weary). Hugh is aware that the being has been coming for him, never
faster than a normal walking pace, and he knows that the only way to avoid
being killed by it is to have sex with someone else, so the entity will follow
his partner instead. However, if the entity is able to kill Jay, it will once
again start seeking out Hugh, and so on back down the line in order. For
this reason, it behooves Hugh to tell Jay what he knows about how the
“curse” operates so that she too can have sex with someone else as soon as
possible, explain the curse, and move the entity’s attention as far away
from her as possible.28 There is never any explanation for how this curse
begins, and there is no indication of how it could be permanently stopped.
This narrative recipe is a sufficiently primal one to launch an effective hor-
ror film, but the twist that makes it a brilliant weird film is that the entity
will appear in different forms each time. It may appear as a stranger or as
someone known to the victim. There is no way to know for sure until it is
too late. Meanwhile, the entity is completely invisible to any other people
who may be present.
While Alan Parker makes skillful use of editing and mise-en-scène to
evoke dread, Mitchell evokes dread in It Follows with Mike Gioulakis’s
masterful cinematography. The fact that neither the characters nor the
audience have any idea what the entity will look like in any given scene
means that the film’s level of tension and dread are ratcheted up more or
less all the time. This strategy plays visually by offering the viewer repeated
wide-angle shots of the characters and their surroundings. Once Hugh
explains the curse to Jay so that both she and the audience understand its
mechanics, the audience is constantly scanning the entire film frame, try-
ing to determine whether any of the extras in frame are the entity. Quite
often, this means that audience members are seeking key information from
beyond the shot’s nominal depth of field. In the scene in which Jay attends
one of her college classes, the camera is focused on Jay, as we would expect
given her prominence both in the story and frame. However, the audience
cannot help but scan the blurry background of the campus quad outside
the classroom windows. The audience knows that the entity is somewhere
at that moment, walking directly toward Jay, and so it becomes attuned to
searching the frame for any person walking toward the main character.
While it is true that the entity can theoretically come from any direction
on land, the audience is forced to pay attention to what it can see. And, in
fact, the entity rarely surprises its victim from outside the camera’s field of
view. Mitchell and Gioulakis clearly established rules regarding the use of
camera in these scenes so that they never “cheat.” The cumulative effect
of these rules, the narrative, and of course the excellent performances
from the cast is one of sustained and crushing otherworldly dread that
elevates It Follows to the status of weird cinema.
Conclusion: Experiences in the Unreal

It remains the case that excellent films based on the works of H. P. Lovecraft
are few and far between. Graham Harman has offered perhaps the most
concise explanation for why Lovecraft’s works are “unfilmable”:
Any film would be forced to commit itself to some distinct appearance of

Cthulhu, even though Lovecraft’s prose lets us know how impossible this is.
The “peculiar abominable quality” of the foreign ship crew would also have
to take on some definite aspect. And any film of “The Colour Out of Space”
would have no choice but to roll the dice on some specific version of dis-
torted chiaroscuro and perspective.29
As Harman points out, Lovecraft often weaves the otherworldly dread in

his tales from imprecise and abstract descriptions. Prose and poetry are
well suited to the representation of the fearful unreal in a manner that does
not also necessarily jettison seriousness, and so we situate Lovecraft in a
long and fertile tradition of weird fiction. However, the photo-realism
inherent to cinematic representation makes the evocation of this particular
sort of dread difficult in the extreme, if not outright impossible.
At the same time, because there are many different ways to evoke oth-
erworldly dread, a tradition of weird cinema is available to us as viewers
and as filmmakers if we look with the lens provided by Lovecraft himself
in SHL. Lovecraft’s own treatise on the weird fiction tradition character-
izes the weird in ways that exceed any one medium. A weird film needs
only to seriously portray a story with at least a hint of the supernatural in
a way that evokes a pervasive feeling of profound and otherworldly dread.
Filmmakers have been producing weird films of this sort (though rarely
based on Lovecraft’s own stories) since the earliest days of narrative fiction
film. I have pointed to a very few of these more recent weird films as
examples of how talented artists can use the aesthetic elements of motion
pictures to create effective weird tales for the screen. I have no doubt that
we will continue to see more weird cinema as time goes on.
250 B. R. HAUSER
All of this said, of course, the weird mode is not ahistorical. It is both
situated in history and constantly in flux. As Cynthia Freeland notes,
“What causes dread may change for different audiences and time periods”
(197), and we might also add that what violates one generation’s under-
standing of the universe may perfectly accord with the science of future
generations. Despite these fluctuations, the weird has always been able to
deliver to its audience an aesthetic experience of the unreal. These experi-
ences are undoubtedly manifold, taking into account the tastes and talents
of weird artists the world over, but all of them hold the promise of a
dreadful encounter with something that alters our concept of the world in
which we live, if only for a few pages or for a couple of hours.
Notes
1. Howard Phillips Lovecraft, “Pickman’s Model,” in More Annotated
H.P. Lovecraft, annotated by S.T. Joshi and Peter Cannon (New York: Dell
Publishing, 1999), 219–220.
2. Caetlin Benson-Allott, “Dreadful Architecture: Zones of Horror in Alien
and Lee Bontecou’s Wall Sculptures.” 14, no. 3 (2015): 267–78.
3. Some very useful thinking has been done regarding horror in the area of
aesthetic philosophy by the likes of Noël Carroll, Cynthia Freeland, Eugene
Thacker, and others, and I will return to this conversation at greater length
later.
4. Andrew Migliore and John Strysik, The Lurker in the Lobby: The Guide to
Lovecraftian Cinema (San Francisco: Night Shade Books, 2006), 31.
5. Poe influences cinema in such early films as The Student of Prague (1913),
Blackwood’s “Ancient Sorceries” is famously the basis for Val Lewton’s
classic Cat People (1943), and there is no way to talk about the cinema of
cosmic fear without talking about Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein, or
The Modern Prometheus (1818) and all of its cinematic adaptations (includ-
ing Thomas Edison’s 1910 short as well as James Whale’s 1931 classic for
Universal Studios). The post-Classical Hollywood weird adaptations
include The Exorcist (1973), Don’t Look Now (1973), The Haunting
(1963), The Shining (1980), and more.
6. More recent adaptation criticism branches out into other questions regard-
ing the manifold relationships between sources and adaptations. See
Thomas M. Leitch, “Twelve Fallacies in Contemporary Adaptation
Theory,” Criticism 45, no. 2 (2003): 149–171.
7. S.T. Joshi, preface to The Lurker in the Lobby, 7.
8. See Jason Dietz, “Are Original Movies Really Better Than Derivative
Works?,” Metacritic, Last modified April 21, 2011, http://www.metac-
ritic.com/feature/movie-sequels-remakes-and-adaptations.
9. Howard Phillips Lovecraft, The Annotated Supernatural Horror in
Literature annotated by S.T. Joshi (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2012),
25. Subsequent citations from this volume appear as in-text pagination.
10. This, I believe, is separate from considerations of references to Lovecraft
and Lovecraft’s creations in popular culture. The appearance of Cthulhu
on South Park does not indicate that media distributors are willing to
spend $150 million or more to produce a truly disturbing “At the
Mountains of Madness” or “Call of Cthulhu.”
11. Contrast Scott Hallam’s “Top 11 Lovecraftian Horror Films” (that lists
films as diverse as Ghostbusters (1984), Re-Animator (1985), Alien, and
Cabin in the Woods (2012)) http://www.dreadcentral.com/news/53204/
top-11-lovecraftian-horror-films, with this dizzying but typical discussion
on “What is the best ‘Lovecraftian’-style horror movie” thread on Reddit
https://www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/2xmp6x/what_is_the_
best_lovecraftianstyle_horror_movie, and with Mike Davis’s list at the
Lovecraft eZine, which he helpfully identifies as both idiosyncratic and
based on what he sees as the key feature of “Lovecraftian horror” as defined
in the Wikipedia entry of the same name https://lovecraftzine.com/mov-
ies/mikes-recommended-lovecraftian-movies
12. Joshi has characterized Lovecraft’s tales up to the publication of “The Call
of Cthulhu” in 1926 as, “entirely routine and conventional, utilizing
supernatural or macabre elements with occasional competence, but with-
out transcendental brilliance.” And though the latter half of the 1920s saw
the creation of most of Lovecraft’s masterpieces, “‘The Dreams in the
Witch House’ (1932) and ‘The Thing on the Doorstep’ (1933) are two
surprisingly inferior tales of his late period.” S.T. Joshi, The Weird Tale
(Holicong: Wildside Press, 1990), 177.
13. Mark Fisher, The Weird And The Eerie (London: Repeater Books, 2016), 15.
14. Ibid., 61.
15. Ibid., 61.
16. Montague Rhodes James, “‘Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’,”
Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (New York: Dover Publications, 1971), 130.
17. Humor, of course, may be present. Characters are apt in some cases to
respond to dangerous situations with a certain kind of gallows humor,
which is entirely appropriate in the serious telling of a weird tale. For
instance, John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982) is full of humorous lines that
do absolutely nothing to derail the onslaught of dread over the course of
the film’s 109 minutes.
252 B. R. HAUSER
18. This is all the more true when one considers the Hollywood inclination
toward upbeat endings. Even in horror films, the defeat of the protagonist(s)
is rarely total. There is usually a “final girl,” as in Carol Clover’s formula-
tion, or the monster is banished or defeated in some fashion. Weird cinema
often separates itself from the majority of horror films by its willingness to
be bleak.
19. Noël Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror, or Paradoxes of the Heart (New
York: Routledge, 1990), 23.
20. Ibid., 42.
21. Cynthia Freeland, “Horror and Art-Dread,” in The Horror Film, ed.
Stephen Prince (Piscataway, Rutgers University Press, 2004), 191.
22. Ibid., 192.
23. Julian Hanich, Cinematic Emotion in Horror Films and Thrillers: The
Aesthetic Paradox of Pleasurable Fear (New York: Routledge, 2010), 156.
24. Ibid., 157.
25. Adam Lowenstein discusses this very thing in an essay treating the relation-
ship between cinematic fear and time. See Lowenstein, Adam. “Living
Dead: Fearful Attractions of Film.” Representations 110, no. 1 (2010):
105–28.
26. Ibid., 196.
27. This is similar to the kind of narrative strategy used in “dread-inspiring
person” films such as The Sixth Sense and The Others.
28. This connection to sexuality is a noteworthy example of how the weird can
deviate significantly from Lovecraft’s own weird stories. Lovecraft steered
clear of overt references to sexuality in the vast majority of his tales, and an
argument can be made that this avoidance of human sexuality as a motive
force helps to emphasize the cosmic insignificance of humanity. However,
as I pointed out in the earlier section of this essay, cosmic horror is by no
means the only route to the weird.
29. Graham Harman, Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy (Hants: Zero
Books, 2012), 80.
CHAPTER 13
Paranoia, Panic, and the Queer Weird
Brian Johnson
[T]he moon cast queer reflections on the silent channel before me.1
There is something queer about the modern weird tale—not surpris-

ingly, given its generic roots in the Gothic fiction of the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries. “Gothic has, in a sense, always been ‘queer,’” write
William Hughes and Andrew Smith.2 But “queer” in what sense? Certainly,
as Hughes and Smith acknowledge, Gothic has historically been associated
with queer sexualities through the biographies of some of its most promi-
nent practitioners: Horace Walpole, William Beckford, and Oscar Wilde,
for example.3 Viewed through such a lens, the genre’s hallmark dialectical
play between disturbing difference and reassuring normativity invites us to
treat the latter as the thinnest of veils while satisfying our desire for the
violent, the grotesque, the depraved, the gratuitous, the supernatural, the
transgressive, and the taboo, which are arguably the genre’s true raisons
d’être. The “horror” such tales ostensibly provoke seems rather hollow on
such a reading, an instance of mock or (in a more psychoanalytic register)
ambivalent recoil that becomes tantalizingly legible as a sly or precariously
I want to thank Adrien Robertson, PhD candidate at Carleton University, for his
invaluable research assistance during the writing of this article.
B. Johnson (*)
English Language and Literature, Carleton University, Ottawa, ON, Canada

254 B. JOHNSON
sublimated impulsion of queer desire that (eventually) expels what it really

wants: “unauthorized genders and sexualities, including sodomy, tribad-
ism, romantic friendship (male and female), incest, pedophilia, sadism,
masochism, necrophilia, cannibalism, masculinized females, feminized
males, miscegenation, and so on.”4
But literary “queerness”—Gothic or otherwise—is now also frequently
taken to mean something less sexually indicative than that as well. Drawing
on the pioneering work of Michel Foucault, Eve Sedgwick, and Judith
Butler, as well as on poststructuralist and deconstructive accounts of lan-
guage and signification, many queer theorists treat the specificity of same-
sex desire as the launching pad for a thoroughgoing critique of categorical
subject positions, “querying (or queerying) the very basis of the categories
we use to talk about ourselves, us queers and us straights.”5 Moreover,
literary texts seem to be particularly charged sites for the investigation of
such questions. As Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle suggest, “literary
texts in general” are “a little (and sometimes more than a little) queer” in
the sense that “some of [their]…strangeness or uncanniness, some of
[their] power and fascination…has to do with the singular space which
they offer for thinking (differently) about gender and sexuality.”6 More
specifically, as Hughes and Smith put it, “queer Gothic…is predicated
upon something more pervasive and, at times, more elusive than sexual
identity…. Queerness, in this sense, is a quality which may be said to
inflect a sense of difference not confined simply to sexual behavior but
which may equally inform a systematic stylistic deviance from perceived
norms in personal style or artistic preference…. Queer is, in this respect, a
matter of both setting oneself aside (personally or artistically) as different,
and of reflecting upon that process by a textuality that may lie at any point
between camp parody and confrontational acerbity.”7
One already hears in such an aesthetically inflected description of
queerness, fundamental aspects of H. P. Lovecraft’s own style, which was
at once anachronistic, “excessive,” unwittingly “parodic” (the famous
accusation leveled against him: that his style was a “parody” of Edgar
Allan Poe’s), yet also confrontational and acerbic (the corrosive racism not
only of his stories but also of his letters). What is one to make of Lovecraft’s
“queerness,” in this sense of a studied marking out of the self as different
at the level of artistic and personal style? To what does what we might call
the “generic queerness” of the weird refer? Certainly Lovecraft’s chosen
genre, the “weird tale,” evokes a fascination with deviance: the strange,
the irregular, those elements of reality that confound quotidian
PARANOIA, PANIC, AND THE QUEER WEIRD 255
suppositions. Indeed, Lovecraft uses “weird” and “queer” interchange-

ably throughout his tales of hybrid grotesqueries and godlike monsters
from other dimensions of space and time to suggest the strange savor of
the anomalous, the incipiently horrible. That “queer” as a term was under-
going a semantic shift in the direction of erotic difference during the
period that Lovecraft was writing is perhaps not incidental to Lovecraft’s
preference for the term’s relatively nonsexual Victorian usage—though,
such a supposition immediately begs the question: to what extent is
Lovecraft’s definition of the term “queer” even specifiable? Indeed, at
what point does the weird intersect with and even converge with the queer
when the latter is understood within the modern sexual register that it
now fully, even joyfully inhabits thanks to its lexical transvaluation by
LGBTQ activists and writers? To what extent is it advisable to read
Lovecraft’s notorious homophobia as evidence that a subterranean homo-
eroticism animates his fiction and philosophy? To what degree and in what
sense can we consider Lovecraft’s weird tales to be congruent with the
vicissitudes of queer gothic? What follows is a necessarily partial and pre-
liminary exploration of what is in fact an extremely daunting set of ques-
tions, particularly given the extraordinary density and volume of
Lovecraft’s creative and critical output, to say nothing of the contradic-
tory tensions that animate the stories themselves.
To begin the work of framing these questions more fully, I want to start
with the inevitable question: was Lovecraft, as J. Vernon Shea and others
have maintained, a “latent homosexual”?8 In the wake of queer theory’s
supple reformulation of the motile and often contradictory relation
between knowledge and desire, only the foolhardy would put the question
so baldly, even when presented with a biography that evokes the Freudian
psychodrama of male homosexual formation and repression as sugges-
tively as Lovecraft’s surely does: the child of an absent, institutionalized
father, raised primarily by his mother and aunts, “cross-dressed” in early
childhood, a reclusive, alienated teen, in adulthood mostly a bachelor,
sexually indifferent as a husband in a failed marriage, intimate of a homo-
social fraternity of authors, mentor to young male writers, homophobe…
The well-known story is so amenable to the interpretive exigencies of the
closet as to make Lovecraft’s epistolary statements about the repulsiveness
of human sexuality or the conclusion of his most authoritative biographer
that Lovecraft was “simply one of those individuals who have a low sex
drive, and for whom the subject is of relatively little interest,”9 sound like
instances protesting too much or inferring too little.
256 B. JOHNSON
The critical inclination to regard Lovecraft’s homophobia as a closet

has been emboldened by the prominence of sexually indifferent male pro-
tagonists, doomed bachelor friendships, and the notable sidelining of
female characters in his stories—a convergence that has yielded several
compelling readings of his work as potentially psychobiographical allego-
ries or even symptoms of “homosexual panic” in which the tropes of cos-
mic and bodily horror often seem equally legible as travestied homoerotic
fantasy. Robert M. Price’s landmark 1982 essay, “Homosexual Panic in
‘The Outsider,’” makes the case for reading Lovecraft’s tale of the narrator-
ghoul’s self-apprehension as a paranoid allegory of homosexual dis-
avowal.10 More recently, Joel Pace has explored the tacit homoeroticism of
cross-gender mesmeric possession in the androgynous Ephraim-Asenath-
Edward triad in “The Thing on the Doorstep,”11 and Bobby Derie has
surveyed the extraordinary range of sexual symbolism and event in
Lovecraft to affirm (albeit, unenthusiastically) that “[w]hether or not they
have a conscious or subconscious homosexual context, the interpretation
of some stories of the Lovecraft Mythos as allegorical of homosexual expe-
rience is valid and worthy of consideration,” proposing, for example, fol-
lowing a suggestion from Price, that “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” can
be read as a queer coming-of-age narrative in which the closeted and
homophobic narrator initially betrays the allegorically homosexual
community of Innsmouth but “finally embrac[es] his own sexuality” in
the story’s concluding perverse self-affirmation.12
Lovecraft’s oeuvre has been evocative for queer readers and Mythos
authors like Stanley C. Sargent, too, for many have recognized in
Lovecraft’s works a profound foreshadowing of their own most intimate
self-confrontations:
I felt convinced the author had gone through the same situation I was going
through, the abject horror of recognizing you are gay in a very anti-gay
world…. I tried to find an alternative reason for Lovecraft considering him-
self such an extreme “outsider,” but I discovered no plausible other reason
for such an extreme feeling of being an isolated monster…. It makes even
more sense if you interpret “The Dunwich Horror” as an autobiographical
cloaked confession of his dilemma. Wilbur obviously represents Lovecraft,
all the way down to Lovecraft believing his own appearance was “hideous”
(again, thanks to mom), and I believe the twin brother was a symbol of the
homosexual desires Lovecraft so desperately tried to suppress. No one could
see the monster and it was essentially so evil that it had to be contained. Yet
it kept growing and even Wilbur feared it would someday break out (read
“come out”) and destroy the world (Lovecraft’s little conservative world).
That thought terrified him as being gay went against everything he believed
in; it must have been awful for him. He surely married Sonia, a mother fig-
ure, in hope of changing his orientation, a very common and futile
mistake.13
Writer and editor Michael O. Varhola concurs, asserting, “That Lovecraft

was indeed a homosexual I am convinced as surely as I would be if he told
me himself.”14 Sargent fleshes out this possibility in his own Mythos fic-
tion, notably, the homoerotically charged “The Black Brat of Dunwich”—
and he is not alone in exploring this territory. Queer Lovecraftiana is now
a burgeoning subgenre that encompasses a range of media from fiction, to
film, to comic books. Derie has surveyed many of these, including Price’s
Mythos stories, Charlotte Mistry and David Holly’s Lovecraftian erotica
and homoerotic comic books like John Blackburn’s Coley (1989) and
Dagger of Blood (1997), or Logan’s Pornomicon (2005). What is perhaps
most notable about the popular queering of Lovecraft is the prominence
of its extension into the Lovecraftian mainstream, where it is integrated
into Mythos tales and retellings that are not produced specifically for
queer audiences or fans of slash fiction. Dan Gildark’s film Cthulhu (2007),
which reinterprets “The Shadow over Innsmouth” as an open-ended con-
frontation between a gay protagonist and the monstrous forces of a cultic
paternal heteronormativity, has tellingly been embraced by one reviewer as
“the closest we’ve come to a true H. P. Lovecraft film.”15 In the realm of
graphic narrative, Hans Rodionoff, Enrique Breccia, and Keith Giffen’s
biographically focused graphic novel, Lovecraft (2003), foregrounds the
thematics of homosexual panic in Lovecraft’s development,16 Joe Hill and
Gabriel Rodríguez’s Lovecratian Locke & Key series features a gender-
switching gay character who evokes Lovecraft’s childhood gender trouble,
and Alan Moore and Jacen Burrows’s current Lovecraftian comic book
series Providence features a gay Jewish protagonist precisely because, as
Moore writes, those aspects of his protagonist “resonated interestingly
with some of Lovecraft’s prejudices” and thus enable a “reappraisal of
Lovecraft” in a series that is the culmination of Moore’s career-long
engagement with Lovecraft and which he characterizes as “perhaps the
most considered and ambitious comic strip approach to Lovecraft as a
writer and a man that has yet been attempted,” one that aims to be “as
true to Lovecraft’s life and his opinions as was possible.”17
258 B. JOHNSON
Yet, as apt as such queerings of an oeuvre that already seems so funda-

mentally and self-evidently queer to many of us undoubtedly feel, the
riddle Lovecraft’s sexuality lingers. No sooner is one carried off by the
conviction that Lovecraft’s fiction is the site of a symptomatic, sometimes
barely sublimated authorial homoeroticism, than the critical phantasm of
a gay Lovecraft evaporates. One recalls, with the clarifying shock of a
bucketful of cold water, Price’s deflating contention that, in spite of the
“vivid parallel” between the paranoid structure of many of Lovecraft’s
tales and the psychic economy of homosexual panic, “Lovecraft seems
never to have undergone this crisis.” Didn’t he? Here is Price again, direct-
ing us to the impasse of Lovecraft’s supposed “latent” homosexuality:
“[it] is not impossible, but neither is it particularly likely (though ulti-
mately, who cares?).”18 Or Pace: “[L]et’s go into [Lovecraft’s] closet,” but
“not necessarily to out him or to find skeletons.”19 Even for those who do
“care,” as Pace certainly does, these are inevitable equivocations, endemic
to an epistemology of the closet, where silence, absence, and “interpret-
ability” are the ambiguous indices of an always putative secret whose
details—indeed, whose existence—no matter how plausible, cannot be
specified with any final degree of assurance.
The present essay argues for the critical productivity of lingering in this
zone of undecidability. Its general concern is to situate Lovecraft’s fiction
and philosophy within the parameters of a queer reading that does not
proceed from an intuition or wish about the author’s “real” sexual object
choice, any more than it would presume the stability or even the con-
sciousness of such an object choice over the span of a life. In other words,
its interest is not in settling the “minoritizing” question about Lovecraft’s
sexuality posed by the conventional wisdom that “there is a distinct popu-
lation of persons who ‘really are’ gay”;20 Price is perfectly correct when he
avers that any definitive resolution to the question of Lovecraft’s sexuality
posed in that way is not likely to be forthcoming. Instead, I want to
develop a queer reading that strategically avoids treating Lovecraft’s fic-
tion as a straightforward sublimation of same-sex desire—not to rule out
the possibility that it is indeed precisely that (an open question, if not
quite an open secret)—but rather to examine two dimensions of Lovecraft’s
corpus that make his work particularly hospitable to queer interpretation
while holding the question of the author’s sexuality in abeyance: Lovecraft’s
homophobia and Lovecraft’s ambivalent discourse on Freud.
With regard to Lovecraft’s homophobia, the paper develops the signifi-
cance of a crucial suggestion of Pace’s that “[a] reconstruction of
Lovecraft’s identity as well as that of his characters…requires consider-

ation of the heteronormative aspects of maleness as well as gay, bisexual,
and transgender elements in his life and works.”21 It develops from
Sedgwick’s caveat when examining the phenomenon of male homosexual
panic that even when examining figures “who are arguably homosexual in
(if such a thing exists) ‘basic’ sexual orientation…panic is proportioned
not to the homosexual but to the nonhomosexual-identified elements of
these men’s characters.”22 It takes as axiomatic that “there is something
rather queer…about being straight.”23 Thus, I concur with Pace’s claim
that “Lovecraft’s later homophobia can most confidently be seen as his
means of self-definition to correspond to his scripted gender role while
distancing himself from the early liminal space he occupied”24; such a con-
clusion (the evidence for which I sketch in more detail below) further
exemplifies Sedgwick’s important caution that queer reading should
sometimes concern itself less with the unverifiable contents of an author’s
biographical closet, and focus more on the ways in which his work makes
visible “the long crisis of modern sexual definition” that emerged out of
“the potent incoherences of homo/heterosexual definition” at the turn of
the twentieth century.25 As Sedgwick argues, these potent incoherences of
modern sexual definition find volatile expression in the fundamental insta-
bility of male heterosexual alloidentification within homophobic, patriar-
chal culture, particularly since the (at least potential) invisibility of male
same-sex desire means that even the most confident assertions of hetero-
sexual masculinity can never entirely escape the ambient paranoia of patri-
archy’s structurally ambiguating homosociality.
On the one hand, as Michel Foucault’s seminal argument has it,
medico-juridical discourse of the latter third of the nineteenth century
reframed male same-sex desire in categorical terms, variously abandoning,
occluding, or subordinating an older language of sodomic “acts” in favor
of more totalizing and calcified assignations of identity, a process which
led ultimately to the consolidation of “the homosexual” as a legal and
ontological category—as Foucault famously puts it, “a species.”26
Proceeding according to a logic of binary opposition, “the heterosexual”
materialized shortly thereafter as though it has always been there and as if
its historical appearance were merely a formalization of the always-already
stable majoritarian category against which the deviations of the homo-
sexual as species were naturally measured. As Sedgwick points out, how-
ever, the categorical opposition of heterosexuality and homosexuality was
constitutively unstable—not simply because it was demonstrably an artifact
260 B. JOHNSON
of discourse (constructions within a regime of truth are of course power-

ful) but more fundamentally because “this process of sexual specification
or species-formation” was not the whole story. Coincident with it, and
overlapping with it, “less stable and identity-bound understandings of
sexual choice also persisted and developed, often among the same people
or interwoven in the same systems of thought.”27 In contrast to the
“minoritizing” discourses of categorical homosexual definition, Sedgwick
uses the term “universalizing” to name those discourses that characterize
sexual desire as “an unpredictably powerful solvent of stable identities,”
such that “apparently heterosexual persons and object choices are strongly
marked by same-sex influences and desires,” with the consequence that
“at least male heterosexual identity and modern masculinist culture may
require for their maintenance the scapegoating crystallization of a same-
sex male desire that is widespread and in the first place internal.”28 Such,
Sedgwick points out, is the psychic structure of paranoia as Freud describes
it. If paranoia is “the psychosis that makes graphic the mechanisms of
homophobia” by effecting a “phantasmatic rejection” that “recast[s] an
original homosexual (or even homosocial) desire” as a fantasy of same-sex
persecution, “homosexual panic” entails the phobic and often violent pro-
cess of boundary marking by which normative masculinity shores up its
privilege within the anxiety-generating homosocial structure of patriarchal
culture.29
Lovecraft’s homophobia exemplifies the consolations but also the insta-
bility of this situation for normative masculinity. On the one hand, its
phobic othering of same-sex-desire in certain abject or monstrous queer
figures evokes a “minoritizing” discourse of homosexual difference by
assigning it a (provisionally) stable and bounded subject position; on the
other hand, such gestures seem to be occasioned by a second, quite con-
tradictory discourse of homosexuality that Sedgwick calls “universalizing”—
“universalizing” in the sense that it embraces, among other things, a
Freudian logic of primary human bisexuality and takes the motility of
human desire within subjects and across range of sexual objects as axiom-
atic. It includes the assumption that “sexual desire is a powerful solvent of
stable identities” and that “apparently heterosexual persons and object
choices are powerfully marked by same-sex influences and desires.”
Crucially, then, it also affirms that “at least male heterosexual identity and
modern masculinist culture may require for their maintenance the scape-
goating crystallization of a same-sex male desire that is widespread and in

the first place internal.”30 Lovecraft’s fiction engages through-and-through
with the destabilizing implications and boundary-drawing mechanisms
that the universalizing understanding of homosexual definition held for
his own nominally heterosexual white male subject position—a position
whose precarity the stories of madness, self-destruction, and transforma-
tion obsessively affirm. It is within this context of masculine heterosexual
self-definition that our sense of Lovecraft’s putative queerness most palpa-
bly takes shape, I argue, for it is ironically the visibility of his homophobic
discourse that licenses the reading of his “horror” stories as inverted
homoerotic fantasies.
In what follows, I treat Lovecraft’s aesthetics and authorial position-
taking as privileged sites for his homophobic response to the “problem”
of precarious masculine heterosexual self-definition because heteronor-
mative masculinity’s constitutive instability is exacerbated for Lovecraft by
the author’s (as we shall see, highly qualified) identification of his aesthet-
ics with those of Oscar Wilde and Sigmund Freud.31 First, I examine the
precarity of heterosexual self-definition that emerges in Lovecraft’s homo-
phobic discourse through a reading of Lovecraft’s ambivalent attraction
of Wilde and the Decadents as models of authorship suitable for articulat-
ing his own distance from Victorian idealism, but dangerous in their evo-
cation of transgressive sexualities; I explore this dilemma further in a
reading of Lovecraft’s “The Hound,” a tale that could be said to allego-
rize, in the register of nightmare, a failed struggle to disentangle its
author’s aesthetic commitment to Wildean decadence from the latter’s
homosexual implication. Subsequently, I show how Lovecraft’s identifica-
tion with Freudian materialism reopens the fraught questions of homo/
heterosexual (self-)definition and symptomatically occasions his delibidi-
nizing of the Freudian unconscious and the neutering of the Freudian
theory of sublimation in Supernatural Horror in Literature. In light of
such anxious boundary maintenance around a precarious but privileged
heteromasculine ideal, the paper imagines how Lovecraft’s philosophical
and metaphysical preoccupations—preoccupations that Lovecraft defines
as specifically extrahuman—might be read according to the protocols of
an epistemology of the closet to reveal the proximity of “cosmic panic” to
“homosexual panic.”
262 B. JOHNSON
Homophobia, Decadence, and “The Hound”

Have you seen that precious sissy that I met in Cleveland? … When I saw
that marcelled what is it I didn’t know whether to kiss it or kill it! It used to
sit cross-legged on the floor at Elgin’s and gaze soulfully upward. It didn’t
like me and Galpin—too horrid, rough and mannish for it!32
Lovecraft’s recollection of his first encounter with Gordon Hatfield,

whom Joshi describes as “the first openly homosexual person Lovecraft
ever met,”33 establishes the structure of homophobic self-consolidation
from which Lovecraft would never truly depart. The hyperbolic dehuman-
ization of Hatfield—“that precious sissy,” “that marcelled what is it,” “it,”
“it,” “it”—within the space of just a few lines is tellingly placed in the
service of a contrastive and collectively homosocial self-portrait: “It didn’t
like me and Galpin—too horrid, rough and mannish for it!” “Me and
Galpin,” but one might equally add: “me and Morton,” to whom the let-
ter is addressed. Patently at stake in this sketch is the question of Lovecraft’s
own masculinity when he finds himself in proximity to other men,
especially to intimates of his circle: better to be “too mannish,” even “hor-
rid and rough,” it seems, than to be a marcelled sissy whose “cross-legged”
pose is a material evocation of the gender-bending confusion that occa-
sions Lovecraft’s own faux-perplexity: “I didn’t know whether to kiss it or
kill it!” One could hardly ask for a more paradigmatic illustration of how
masculine friendships (Lovecraft-Galpin, Lovecraft-Morton) felt the pres-
sure to publicly affirm their heteronormativity through the ritualization of
homophobia.
As Pace notes in his discussion of another letter of Lovecraft’s—this
one to Frank Belknap Long—about the same incident, “it is safe to assume
that Lovecraft may have not considered it entirely accurate if Hatfield were
to perceive him as ‘a masculine sort of person,’” as the second letter reiter-
ates.34 Whatever credence one gives to any gender confusion that Lovecraft
may have experienced as a child, the adult Lovecraft was hardly a standard-
bearer for normative masculinity, particularly given his self- conscious
adoption of an aristocratic habitus. Lovecraft’s identification with the aris-
tocracy stemmed from his belief in its unique role as a matrix of cultural
production at the highest level, a position summarized by his claim that
“Aristocracy alone is capable of creating thoughts and objects of value.”35
Lovecraft’s view of his own creative output as the work of a committed
amateur (as opposed to a “professional” hack) epitomizes this conviction,
since, like the aristocrat, the amateur writes only for “the love of writing
and the thrill of aesthetic conquest,” not for “gold” that would “weigh
[him] down or buy [his] conscience.”36 That the Anglophilic Lovecraft
regarded himself as an heir to the aristocracy’s cultural function there can
be no doubt. When he writes that “[t]he healthiest aristocracy is the most
elastic—willing to beckon and receive as accessions all men of whatever
antecedents who prove themselves aesthetically and intellectually fitted for
membership,” he is arguing for his own inclusion in a tradition of cultural
producers whose historic function is to retard “the process of [cultural]
deterioration” that occurs when democracies and oligarchies overthrow
the aristocratic sources of “the original culture,” and thereby hold at bay
the catastrophic eventuality that “the rabble [will] gain full sway,” causing
“taste…to vanish, and dullness [to reign] darkly triumphant over the ruins
of culture.”37
Yet, as Sedgwick notes in her history of the paranoid Gothic, the femi-
nization of the aristocracy had been underway in bourgeois ideology since
the early modern period, and “by the turn of the twentieth century, after
the trials of Oscar Wilde, the ‘aristocratic’ role had become the dominant
one available for homosexual men of both upper and middle classes,” a
development that had a significant impact on “the emergent middle-class
homophobic culture of ‘male bonding.’”38 Lovecraft’s identification with
the aristocracy as part of his own self-presentation was thus necessarily
fraught by the term’s polyvalence, not only because of Lovecraft’s immer-
sion in artistic circles that were at once homosocial and homosexual in
composition but also—indeed, especially—because of Lovecraft’s ambiva-
lent identification with Oscar Wilde during his own “Decadent phase” of
the early 1920s. As Joshi recounts, this was a period in which Lovecraft
was working through the implications that Freud and Nietzsche’s episte-
mological demolition of Victorian values and modern science’s decenter-
ing effects on human significance held for the future of literary art.39
Reaching for a solution to the dilemma that “Art has been wrecked by a
complete consciousness of the universe which shews that the world is to
each man only a rubbish-heap limned by his individual perception” (the
“bizarre, tasteless, defiant, and chaotic” modernisms of T. S. Eliot, James
Joyce, and D. H. Lawrence feature prominently in Lovecraft’s diatribe),
Lovecraft hitched his wagon to the knowing artifices of Wilde and the
Decadents:
264 B. JOHNSON
It will be saved, if at all, by the next and last step of disillusion; the realiza-
tion that complete consciousness and truth are themselves valueless, and
that to acquire any genuine artistic titillation we must artificially invent limi-
tations of consciousness and feign a pattern of life common to all mankind—
most naturally the simple old pattern which ancient and groping tradition
first gave us….It is then that we shall worship afresh the light and color of
divine language, and take an Epicurean delight in those combinations of
ideas and fancies which we know to be artificial.”40
In his bid to rescue at least the baby of aesthetic classicism from the expur-
gated bathwater of an increasingly obsolete Victorian idealism, “Lovecraft
found Wilde a highly articulate spokesman for the sort of views he was
nebulously coming to adopt,” especially the Wilde of Dorian Gray, a text
whose slogans—“No artist has ethical sympathies…The artist can express
everything…All art is quite useless…”—Lovecraft strategically adopted as
bulwarks against the deluge of a vulgarized literary modernism.41
Yet such an identification with the aestheticism of the notorious exem-
plar of “aristocratic” homosexuality did not come without a certain risk.
As Joshi argues, even though Lovecraft leaned heavily on Wilde to “carv[e]
out a place for himself between Victorian conventionality and Modernist
radicalism,” he “had no wish to follow the Decadents in the repudiation
of Victorianism on the level of personal conduct.”42 So much is evident in
Lovecraft’s increasingly shrill and panicky bifurcation of Wilde in a 1927
letter to August Derleth, where even Wilde’s writing is damned with faint
praise:
About Oscar Wilde—it seems to me that he forms a prominent point in the

history of literature without having been supremely great himself…. [W]hen
one analyses what he actually wrote one finds more of cleverness than of real
genius, & more of accomplished mannerism than of truly comprehensive &
penetrating vision….I suppose on the whole he will always be regarded as
more or less of a landmark…As a man, however, Wilde admits of absolutely
no defense. His character, notwithstanding a daintiness of manners which
imposed an exterior shell of decorative decency & decorum, was as thor-
oughly rotten & contemptible as it is possible for a human character to be;
a fact which is unfortunately established beyond mere rumor by the reluc-
tant testimony of those toward whom he practiced no concealment. So
thorough was his absence of that form of taste which we call a moral sense,
that his derelictions comprised not only the greater and grosser offences,
but all those petty dishonesties, shiftinesses, pusillanimities, & affected
contemptibilities & cowardices which mark the mere “cad” or “bounder” as

well as the actual “villain.” It is an ironic circumstance that he who s ucceeded
for a time in being the Prince of Dandies, was never in any basic sense what
one likes to call a gentleman…. [I]t is hard to feel much charity or affection
toward the bloated, dissipated, & diseased old high-liver who virtually rot-
ted to pieces & exploded in “Valdemar” fashion on that grey winter day of
1900.43
Much could be said about Wilde’s rhetorical plunge from reluctantly

accredited “landmark…more or less” to the abject “Valdemar”-like rotten
and exploding horror he becomes in Lovecraft’s concluding volley. What
is perhaps most noteworthy about Lovecraft’s reflections on the Prince of
Dandies,” who “was never in any basic sense what one likes to call a gentle-
man,” is the sheer homophobic vitriol of its hatred, which precisely repeats
the structure of abjection in his account of Hatfield in order to manage the
proximity of his own aristocratic persona to Wilde’s. In both cases, the
threatening proximity of homosexuality occasions the paranoid evocation
of inhuman monsters.
Lovecraft’s thematization of Decadence in “The Hound,” a tale writ-
ten in October 1922, roughly contemporaneous with the encounter with
Hatfield detailed in letters to Morton and Long, makes a striking and
peculiarly revealing companion piece to his early qualified advocacy of a
Wildean aesthetic and to the homophobic portrait of Hatfield as an “it”
about whom he was facetiously uncertain whether to “kiss” or to “kill.”
Inverting the Hatfield anecdote, which illustrates the method by which
normative homosociality can be preserved from queer implosion by keep-
ing “sissies” at arm’s length, “The Hound” might be read as dramatizing
the failure of homophobic abjection and the collapse of homosocial bond-
ing in a horror tale about the slippery slope of Decadent adventuring. In
outline, the tale concerns the destruction of a pair of jaded male friends
(Joshi identifies these as fictionalized versions of Lovecraft and Rheinhart
Kleiner)44 who, “[w]earied with the commonplaces of a prosaic world,”
embark on an aesthetically rarified campaign of grave-robbing once they
grow bored of even the Decadent aesthetic philosophies of Baudelaire and
Huysmans. Driven by “this frightful emotional need,” their search for the
“more direct stimuli of unnatural personal experiences and adventures”
leads them to assemble a ghoulish underground “museum,” “a universe of
terror” where they display their grave trophies, “the most incredible and
unimaginable variety of tomb-loot ever assembled by human madness and
266 B. JOHNSON
perversity.”45 Joshi’s surmise that the subterranean museum, where

“comely, life-like bodies perfectly stuffed and cured by the taxidermist’s
art” rub shoulders with “cases of antique mummies,” may be “a playful
reference” to Lovecraft’s homosexual friend Samuel Loveman’s “impres-
sive collection of objects d’art”46 seems especially apposite given the way
the story’s Decadent mise-en-scène seems to invest the men’s “life of
unnatural excitements”47 and especially the “ecstatic[ally] titillat[ing]”48
act of grave-robbing with a distinctly homoerotic charge.
In spite of this erotic valence, the narrator’s account of his nocturnal
adventures with “St. John” is initially presented in terms that strongly
evoke sublimation:
The predatory excursions on which we collected our unmentionable trea-

sures were always artistically memorable events. We were no vulgar ghouls,
but worked only under certain conditions of mood, landscape, environ-
ment, weather, season, and moonlight. These pastimes were to us the most
exquisite form of aesthetic expression, and we gave their details a fastidious
technical care. An inappropriate hour, a jarring lighting effect, or a clumsy
manipulation of the damp sod, would almost totally destroy for us that
ecstatic titillation which followed the exhumation of some ominous, grin-
ning secret of the earth.49
Here, in effect, is a fictionalized version of Lovecraft’s own literary “grave-

robbing”—from Edgar Allan Poe, M. R. James, Arthur Machen, Lord
Dunsany, Oscar Wilde, and others. The passing suggestion of homoeroti-
cism—“ecstatic titillation”—is largely subordinated here to the aesthetic
outpourings of the creative drive. But the artistic sublimation of erotic
energies that the two friends achieve in their museological hobby proves
unsustainable:
Our quest for novel scenes and piquant conditions was feverish and insa-
tiate—St. John was always the leader, and he it was who led the way at last
to that mocking, that accursed spot which brought us our hideous and inev-
itable doom.50
The narrator’s defenses spring up spontaneously in this incoherent claim:

St. John’s incautious leadership interposes itself between the narrator and
what was, moments before, “[o]ur quest,” “feverish and insatiate.” The
same defensive recoil can be felt in the passive construction of what
comes next, but its efficacy is belied by the uncanny operation of a
“malign fatality” that binds the men to their monstrous double according
to a relentless logic of identification:
By what malign fatality were we lured to that terrible Holland churchyard?

I think it was the dark rumour and legendry, the tales of one buried for five
centuries, who had himself been a ghoul in his time and had stolen a potent
thing from a mighty sepulchre.51
Back in Cleveland, Lovecraft and Galpin had been preserved from any
possibility of identifying with an abject “it” by the conviction that the
effeminate Hatfield “didn’t like” their rough, horrid, mannishness; in the
Dutch graveyard of “The Hound,” however, the narrator and St. John
find themselves drawn into abjection and eventually destruction by their
uncanny encounter with a ghoulish and alarmingly potent doppelganger:
“The skeleton, though crushed in places by the jaws of the thing that had
killed it, held together with surprising firmness, and we gloated over the
clean white skull and its long, firm teeth and its eyeless sockets that once
had glowed with a charnel fever like our own.”52 The uncanniness of this
moment of fatal recognition is confirmed by the details of the ghoul’s
grave jewelry. The amulet, emblazoned with “a crouching winged hound,
or sphinx with a semi-canine face,” gives form to a mythological beast
already known to the grave robbers from their reading of the Necronomicon
as “the ghastly soul-symbol of the corpse-eating cult of inaccessible Leng,
in Central Asia.”53 The story’s semantic movement from grave-robbing to
corpse-eating is indicative of the desublimation that the ghoul itself
represents and is, for this reason, the turning point in the tale. From the
moment of anagnorisis that occurs at the ghoul’s open grave, the men are
doomed, and the story moves from a sublimated presentation of homo-
eroticism as purely aesthetic adventure to a still-allegorical but now signifi-
cantly desublimated presentation of homoeroticism as “corpse-eating”—a
figure of taboo orality that finds euphemistic expression in the story as the
act of being “torn to ribbons” and reduced to “an inert mass of mangled
flesh.”54 Such is St. John’s fate, after the pair return to England, cut ties
with the community, and transform their homosociality into a dangerously
closed system: “We lived as recluses; devoid of friends, alone, and without
servants in a few rooms of an ancient manor-house on a bleak and unfre-
quented moor; so that our doors were seldom disturbed by the knock of
the visitor.”55 The slippage from homosociality to sexual transgression that
such self-enclosure implies is suggested in the second half of the story
268 B. JOHNSON
when the narrator complains of how “we were troubled by what seemed
to be frequent fumblings in the night, not only around the doors but
around the windows also, upper as well as lower.” 56 These nighttime
“fumblings” are ostensibly the harassments of the night-ghoul, who,
animated by the amulet’s infernal power, has followed them to
England, where he eventually murders St. John; but they also evoke
the possibility of more pleasurable fumblings between the Decadent
adventurers that make “the frightful carnivorous thing”’s attack on
St. John legible as homophobic narrative retribution for inadequately
regulated homosociality.
At the climax of the tale, the narrator finds himself back in “that terrible
Holland churchyard,”57 desperately hoping that he can save himself. His
fantasy of salvation, however, is interrupted by a curious event that raises
new questions about the extent of Lovecraft’s reading of Freud, “whose
system of psycho-analysis,” Lovecraft wrote to Anne Tillery Renshaw in
1921, “I have begun to investigate”58:
I know not why I went thither unless to pray, or gibber out insane pleas and
apologies to the calm white thing that lay within; but, whatever my reason,
I attacked the half-frozen sod with a desperation partly mine and partly that
of a dominating will outside myself. Excavation was much easier than I
expected, though at one point I encountered a queer interruption; when a
lean vulture darted down out of the cold sky and pecked frantically at the
grave-earth until I killed him with a blow of my spade. Finally I reached the
rotting oblong box and removed the damp nitrous cover. This is the last
rational act I ever performed.59
The “queer interruption” of the vulture occurs in a passage that is marked

by uncertainty and seems to flag the presence of unconscious motives: “I
know not why I went thither…but whatever my reason…” The only
explanation that the narrator provides concerns the possibility that he can
somehow save himself by placating “the black, shapeless Nemesis” that, in
this reading, embodies the narrative’s homophobic judgment on Decadent
masculinities—presumably by assuring his persecutor that he has
renounced his quest for “ecstatic titillation,” as his “destr[uction] by fire
and burial the rest of the impious collection in the museum” implies.60
The possibility remains, however, that the narrator is still caught in the
grip of precisely those “feverish and insatiate” passions and “frightful
emotional need” that drove him and St. John to “grave-robbing” in the
first place, particularly since, in a delicious irony, he reaches for salvation

by grasping the grave shovel and repeating the transgressive act of exhu-
mation he has supposedly renounced. It is into this profoundly ambiguous
scene that the vulture and its “queer interruption” descends.
As George Chauncey has pointed out, the meaning of “queer” as
“essentially synonymous with ‘homosexual’” was a common feature of
New York usages of the term “by the 1910s and 1920s.”61 Lovecraft did
not settle in New York until 1924, two years after “The Hound”’s com-
position, but the term had been undergoing its semantic rearticulation in
the direction of homosexuality for some time prior to the OED’s first
recorded usage of this sense of “queer” in 1922.62 It is possible that
Lovecraft was aware of this usage of the word that he deploys so liberally
throughout his entire oeuvre, but even without any deliberate association
between queerness and sexuality in this instance, the vulture’s “queer
interruption” of the narrator’s final confrontation with his ghoulish dou-
ble seems to frame the story’s climax as a drama of homosexual panic.
Joshi points out that Lovecraft had experienced a similar avian interrup-
tion during an excursion to a Dutch church in Brooklyn,63 but perhaps a
more suggestive parallel is the one that furnishes Freud with the phantas-
matic kernel of his analysis of homosexuality and sublimation in Leonardo
da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood (1910; trans. 1916). The “mem-
ory” in question is in Freud’s judgment not a true memory at all but a
fantasy that Leonardo projects back onto his childhood: “when I was still
in my cradle a vulture came down to me, opened my mouth with its tail
and struck me many times with its tail against my lips.”64 The vulture
fantasy, in which the vulture’s phallic tail displaces the mother’s breast,
becomes, in Freud’s classic text, the matrix of his account of “one type of
‘homosexuality,’”65 namely: a homosexuality that is rooted in the male
child’s idealization of and identification with the mother, the latter of
whom is figured in Leonardo’s “memory” of a pre-Oedipal moment as a
potent hermaphroditic figure—the vulture’s tail as maternal penis.
Whether Lovecraft was aware of Freud’s psychohistory of Leonardo or
not is not something we can know for certain,66 but the “queer” appear-
ance of the vulture at the climax of Lovecraft’s tale about the dangers of
homosocial Decadence is striking to say the least. Insofar as it can be read
as an allusion to homosexuality, the vulture’s appearance at this moment
of psychic opacity has the effect of confirming the theory that the narra-
tor remains in the grip of his original animating passions, even as his
spontaneously murderous response to it allegorizes the “kiss it or kill it”
270 B. JOHNSON
psychodynamics of homosexual panic: “I killed him with a blow from my

spade.” The futility of this ritual abjection is laid bare, however, in the
story’s concluding moments, for the narrator unseals the casket to
encounter the gory presence of the “leering,” “bay[ing],” “bony thing”
one final time and goes mad, ultimately resolving to “seek with [his]
revolver the oblivion which is [his] only refuge from the unnamed and
the unnameable.”67
The triteness of this conclusion papers over Lovecraft’s sometimes
more complex response to the felt precarity of masculine heterosexual self-
presentation. In a 1933 letter to J. Vernon Shea, Lovecraft recalls “the
Wilde period” of the 1890s and speculates about the historical contin-
gency of “this perversion” which “occurs more frequently in some periods
than in others—owing to obscure biological & psychological causes”—
“Decadent ages” with their “unsettled” psychology being particularly fer-
tile ground for such efflorescence. To this predictable rehearsal of
Lovecraft’s antipathies, however, the letter appends a surprising decou-
pling of the stereotyped conflation of male effeminacy with
homosexuality:
[M]any nowadays overlook the fact that there are distinctly effeminate types
which are most distinctly not homosexual. I don’t know how psychology
explains them, but we all know the sort of damned sissy who plays with girls
& who—when he grows up—is a chronic ‘cake-eater,’ hanging around girls,
doting on dances, acquiring certain feminine mannerisms, intonations, &
tastes, & yet never having even the slightest perversion of erotic inclina-
tions….It is curious how this type of sissy seems to be forgotten amidst the
modern wave of interest in homosexuality. I have come across many in my
time—& it would certainly be absurd (in view of their constant interest in
girls & lack of even friendly feelings toward men & boys) to assume that the
basis of their peculiarities is deeply sexual. These people hardly represent a
real problem, although they are distinctly ridiculous & repellent.68
It is difficult to know to what degree Lovecraft may have identified with

such “effeminate types,” given how hard he seems to work to assure him-
self and his interlocutors that he presented as “a masculine sort of person”
to sissies of the other sort. And of course, Lovecraft’s decoupling of effem-
inacy from homosexuality hardly qualifies as a defense of the former;
straight sissies are still, like their queer cousins, “ridiculous” and “repel-
lent.” But the impulse to disentangle gender norms from sexual object
choice points at least to the proximity of these concerns for Lovecraft and
suggests that he wished to preserve a conceptual space for the possibility

of a slightly perverse heterosexuality, one still marked by the homophobic
(and it must be said, misogynist) structure of homosexual panic but which
nonetheless could accommodate popular signifiers of homosexuality with-
out precipitating the slide into degeneracy. Lovecraft’s “damned sissy,” in
other words, emerges in the letters, inflected negatively, as a still-
ambivalent-because-unspeakable “wish” for a masculine script that could
disarticulate gender nonconformity from queerness so that the latter may
be more decisively rejected in the very instances which, to some eyes,
might seem most violently to affirm its pertinence.
Lovecraft’s Freud and Supernatural Horror

in Literature as Fantasy
“The Hound” is a text in which the distinction between homosexual panic

as an anxious limit for heteronormative masculinity and homosexual panic
as a still more threatening eruption of same-sex desire seems particularly
unstable. That the story should evoke the specter of Freud in its climacti-
cally ambiguating moment indicates something of the problem that the
Viennese psychoanalyst posed for Lovecraft with respect to question of
the relation between sex and aesthetics. As Lovecraft wrote in 1921, “We
may not like to accept Freud, but I fear we shall have to do so.”69 And
accept him he did, but grudgingly, and on his own terms. On the one
hand, Freud’s aesthetic theory, which posited the sublimation of libido as
the motor of aesthetic activity, seemed preposterous to Lovecraft, who
repeatedly rejected the prominence that Freud (and his modernist adher-
ents) accorded the sexual instincts in the creation of art. As he writes in a
letter to R. H. Barlow in 1935: “Sex?…That it serves as a stimulus to all
other kinds of human activity is very probable; but this of course involves
sublimated, etherealized, & tenuously associated forms of it which have
nothing in common with the cheap wenching of the rabble & of the
Greenwich-Village type of decadent pseudo-intelligentsia….The Freudians
confuse its frequent choice (by a decadent modernity) as subject-matter
with its supposed function as an ingredient of the whole aesthetic
process….”70 Championing sublimation under the banner of “the regular-
ization & canalization of eroticism,”71 Lovecraft objected particularly to
the what he saw as Freud and the modernists’ overestimation of the sexual
impulse in the realm of human psychology and more particularly as the
272 B. JOHNSON
hidden motor of aesthetic practice. Yet, as his acceptance of sublimation as

the mechanism of cultural production implies, Lovecraft was compelled by
Freud’s structural account of a rational ego that was haunted by irrational
unconscious forces—a structure that a story like “The Rats in the Walls”
virtually allegorizes. “[W]hile many of Freud’s most important details may
be erroneous--one should not be too hasty in substituting any single or
simple instinct for the complex and dominant Wille zur Macht as the
explanation of man’s motive force--he has nevertheless opened up a new
path in psychology, devising a system whose doctrines more nearly approx-
imate the real workings of the mind than any heretofore entertained.”72
One of Lovecraft’s responses to this situation was to correct what he
regarded as Freud’s error. Although Lovecraft largely accepted the latter’s
structural account of the psyche as a site of uncanny haunting by irrational
forces, he narrowed the scope of these forces, limiting their character to
“aggression,” “will to power,” and “ego-assertion.”73 At the same time,
he posited a more primal psychic condition than libidinal desire and a
more profound bogey of the unconscious: “[t]he oldest and strongest
emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear
of the unknown.”74
Lovecraft’s landmark account of the weird tradition in fiction,
Supernatural Horror in Literature, exemplifies this latter move by which
Lovecraft outmaneuvers Freud’s sexually inflected account of aesthetics.
Indeed, Lovecraft characterizes the weird tale as a literary mode defined
by its indifference to orthodox psychoanalytic interpretation: “no amount
of rationalisation, reform, or Freudian analysis can quite annul the thrill of
the chimney-corner whisper or the lonely wood.”75 The weird tale, in
other words, cannot be reduced to the reading protocols of Freud’s “puer-
ile symbolism.”76 Lovecraft does not reject psychology in his theorization
of a literature whose sources are avowedly “unconscious.”77 Instead, he
reconfigures psychology by delibidinizing Freud in the context of a generic
history that culminates in Lovecraft’s own creative output. Ostensibly, in
other words, Lovecraft’s history of weird fiction offers an account of the
literary cognate of his own philosophy of cosmic indifferentism—a philo-
sophical position, the acceptance of which, signifies the rational subject’s
intellectual and affective transcendence of the irrational Victorian human-
istic and idealistic mythologies for which Lovecraft the materialist had so
much contempt. Freud was Lovecraft’s ally here, his psychoanalysis signi-
fying for Lovecraft, “the end of idealistic thought.”78 This privileged posi-
tion is summed up in Lovecraft’s portrait of the weird tale’s ideal reader:
one of the “sensitive,” “[r]elatively few” who possess “a certain degree of

imagination and a capacity for detachment from everyday life.”79 Lovecraft
was obviously such a reader, and it is difficult not to see in this description
an authorial self-portrait, just as it is difficult not to see Supernatural
Horror in Literature as a genealogy of Lovecraft’s by that point already
extensive literary corpus. It is thus perhaps not inappropriate to read in
this account of weird fiction’s generic triumph and epistemological privi-
lege its author’s own ego-fantasy—a fantasy of the sort described by Freud
in “Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming” (1907): an imaginative wish-
fulfillment, either ambitious or erotic, in which the author invents “a hero
who is the center of interest, for whom the writer tries to win our sympa-
thy by every possible means and whom he seems to place under the pro-
tection of a special providence”—“we have no difficulty in recognizing
His Majesty the Ego, the hero of every daydream and of every novel.”80
The closed circle of Lovecraft’s generic history, which begins with
Lovecraft’s theorization of “the oldest emotion of mankind” and con-
cludes with the implicit consolidation of the genre in which Lovecraft’s
own writing becomes legible, functions as just such a “special providence”
ensuring the author-ego-hero’s “characteristic invulnerability.”81
But to what, exactly, does Lovecraft’s critical-historical fantasy render
him invulnerable? If Lovecraft’s literary-critical story of the rise, survival,
and perfection of “the literature of cosmic fear”82 is taken to be a kind of
authorial fantasy, what sort of wish could it be said to fulfill—ambitious?
erotic? Given Lovecraft’s tacit self-positioning as the inheritor of the weird
tradition Supernatural Horror in Literature assembles, it is not difficult to
assent to the possibility that the text is, whatever its objective merits as a
generic history, a fantasy of ambition. But psychoanalytic fantasies are
rarely so straightforward, particularly if they involve, in the manner of
dreams, unconscious “wishes of which we are ashamed” and which thus,
in Freud’s famous formulation, “express themselves only in a grossly dis-
torted form.”83 In such a light, how might we begin to approach the
erotic entanglements of an account of a literary genre whose explicit phil-
osophical cognate is “cosmic indifferentism”? What are we to make of a
theory of genre that takes as axiomatic that “we remember pain and the
menace of death more vividly than pleasure,” that “[t]he oldest and stron-
gest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear
is fear of the unknown,” and that “[t]he one test of the really weird is
simply this—whether or not there be excited in the reader a profound
sense of dread, and of contact with unknown spheres and powers”?84 To
274 B. JOHNSON
what phobic “unknown” object does a literature of paranoia and “cosmic

panic”85 ultimately refer, particularly in light of the extraordinarily libidi-
nal undercurrents of Lovecraft’s copulative cosmic entity in “The Dunwich
Horror” and the intimations of transgressive sex that thread their way
through his fiction, from the “orgiastic rites” of “Call of Cthulhu” to the
gender-bending marriage of “The Thing on the Doorstep”?
The answer, quite simply, is that we cannot truly know Lovecraft’s sex-
uality, as tempting as the thought experiment might be. Nevertheless,
Lovecraft’s delibidinization of Freudian aesthetics is significant, if only
because it demonstrates the impasse in Lovecraft’s work between sexuality
and its disavowal. Lovecraft’s materialist philosophy of “cosmic
indifferentism” and the weird literature of “cosmic fear” or “cosmic panic”
that it occasions in its pre-philosophical articulation can be read, from a
classical Freudian vantage point, as the sublimation of a dilemma that is
fundamentally libidinal and which is legible to us today as “homosexual
panic,” even if only at the level of heteronormative anxiety. “Cosmic
panic” is the affective hallmark of a genre of weird writing with which
Lovecraft strongly identified, and around which he constructed an intel-
lectual scaffolding that sought explicitly to rebut the libidinal theories of
Freudian aesthetics—the better, perhaps, to defend his own oeuvre from
the very interpretations that his only partial repudiation of Freud contin-
ues to enable. Supernatural Horror in Literature provides an account of
the weird tale that seems designed to allow the genre to transcend a libidi-
nal reading of sublimation and the hermeneutics of suspicion it implies;
Lovecraft’s own, far more corporeal and materially viscous fictions, how-
ever, restore something of the flavor of the Queer Weird, and invite us to
listen cautiously and with a queer ear to Lovecraft’s suggestive profession:
“Man’s relations to man do not captivate my fancy. It is man’s relation to
the cosmos—to the unknown—which alone arouses in me the spark of
creative imagination.”86
Notes
1. H. P. Lovecraft, “Dagon,” in The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories,
ed. S. T. Joshi (Toronto: Penguin, 1999), 5.
2. William Hughes and Andrew Smith, introduction to Queering the Gothic,
eds. William Hughes and Andrew Smith (New York: Manchester University
Press, 2009), 1.
3. Ibid., 2.
4. George E. Haggerty, Queer Gothic (Chicago: University of Illinois Press,

2006), 2.
5. Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle, “Queer,” in Introduction to
Literature, Criticism and Theory (New York: Longman, 2004), 191.
6. Ibid., 189.
7. Hughes and Smith, Queering the Gothic, 2–3.
8. Bobby Derie, Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos (New York: Hippocampus Press,
2014), Kindle Edition.
9. S. T. Joshi, H. P. Lovecraft: A Life (New York: Necronomicon Press, 1996),
341.
10. Robert M. Price, “Homosexual Panic in ‘The Outsider,’” Crypt of Cthulhu
8 (1982).
11. Joel Pace, “Queer Tales? Sexuality, Race, and Architecture in ‘The Thing
on the Doorstep,’” Lovecraft Annual 2 (2008).
12. Derie, Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos, Kindle Edition.
13. Ibid., Kindle Edition.
14. Michael O. Varhola, “The Lovecraft That Dare Not Speak Its Name,”
d-Infinity, accessed July 15, 2016, http://d-infinity.net/editorial/
lovecraft-dare-not-speak-its-name-%E2%80%94-part-4
15. Andrew Kasch, “Cthulhu (DVD),” Dread Central, accessed July 14, 2016,
http://www.dreadcentral.com/reviews/11317/cthulhu-dvd/
16. For a discussion of Lovecraft, see Pace, “Queer Tales?,” 133–35.
17. Alan Moore and Hannah Means Shannon, “Alan Moore Writes a Gay
Jewish Protagonist For Providence to Address Lovecraft’s Prejudices,”
Bleeding Cool, accessed July 14, 2016, http://www.bleedingcool.
com/2015/04/23/alan-moore-writes-a-gay-jewish-protagonist-for-
providence-to-address-lovecrafts-prejudices/; Alan Moore and Hannah
Means Shannon, “Alan Moore Heralds Providence: ‘It’s Time to Go For a
Reappraisal of Lovecraft,’” Bleeding Cool, accessed July 14, 2016, http://
www.bleedingcool.com/2015/03/05/alan-moore-heralds-providence-
time-go-reappraisal-lovecraft/; Alan Moore, “Alan Moore Talks About
Providence,” Previews World, accessed July 14, 2016, http://www.pre-
viewsworld.com/Home/1/1/71/977?articleID=161192
18. Price, “Homosexual Panic,” 11–12.
19. Pace, “Queer Tales?,” 107.
20. Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, 85.
21. Ibid., 115.
22. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2008), 195.
23. Bennett and Royle, “Queer,” 191.
276 B. JOHNSON
24. Pace attributes this “early liminal space” to the theory that Lovecraft expe-
rienced gender confusion as a child, thanks to his mother’s habit of dress-
ing him in gowns and keeping his hair long. “Queer Tales?,” 107–08.
25. Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet 1–2.
26. Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, Volume 1, trans., Robert Hurley
(New York: Pantheon, 1978), 43.
28. Ibid., 85.
29. Eve Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial
Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 91–92.
31. Lovecraft’s ambivalent homosocial identification with Edgar Allan Poe as a
literary precursor is also part of this series and is undoubtedly an important
context for Lovecraft’s homophobia. I have treated this relationship else-
where: Brian Johnson, “‘The Strangeness of My Heritage:’ Lovecraft’s Poe
and the Anxiety of Influence,” The Lovecraftian Poe: Essays on Influence,
Reception, Interpretation, and Transformation, ed. Sean Moreland
(Bethlehem: Lehigh University Press, 2017): 1–25.
32. H. P. Lovecraft to James F. Morton, January 8, 1924, in H. P. Lovecraft
Selected Letters I (1911–1924), ed. August Derleth and Donald Wandrei
(Sauk City, Wisconsin: Akham House, 1965), 280.
33. S. T. Joshi, I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H. P. Lovecraft (New
York: Hippocampus Press, 2010), 427.
34. Pace, “Queer Tales?,” 114.
35. H. P. Lovecraft, “Nietzsche and Realism,” in Collected Essays Volume 5:
Philosophy, Autobiography & Miscellany, ed. S. T. Joshi (New York:
Hippocampus, 2006), 70.
36. H. P. Lovecraft, “The Professional Incubus,” in Collected Essays Volume 2:
Literary Criticism, ed. S. T. Joshi (New York: Hippocampus, 2004), 76.
37. H. P. Lovecraft, “Nietzsche and Realism,” in Collected Essays Volume 5:
Hippocampus, 2006), 70–71.
38. Sedgwick, Between Men, 92–94.
39. Joshi, I Am Providence, 470–71.
40. H. P. Lovecraft, “Lord Dunsany and His Work,” in Collected Essays Volume
2: Literary Criticism, ed. S. T. Joshi (New York: Hippocampus, 2004),
60–61.
41. Joshi, I Am Providence, 472.
42. Ibid., 473–74.
43. H. P. Lovecraft to August Derleth, January 20, 1927, in Essential Solitude:
The Letters of H. P. Lovecraft to August Derleth: 1926–1931 (New York:
Hippocampus, 2013), 64–65.
44. S. T. Joshi, Explanatory Note to “The Hound,” in The Call of Cthulhu and
Other Weird Stories by H. P. Lovecraft (New York: Penguin 1999), 378.
45. H. P. Lovecraft, “The Hound,” in The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird
Stories, ed. S. T. Joshi (Toronto: Penguin, 1999), 81–82.
46. S. T. Joshi, Explanatory Note to “The Hound,” in The Call of Cthulhu and
Other Weird Stories by H. P. Lovecraft (New York: Penguin 1999), 378.
47. H. P. Lovecraft, “The Hound,” 86.
48. Ibid., 83.
49. Ibid., 82–83.
50. Ibid., 83.
51. Ibid., 83.
52. Ibid., 84.
53. Ibid., 84.
54. Ibid., 86.
55. Ibid., 85.
56. Ibid., 85.
57. Ibid., 83.
58. H. P. Lovecraft to Anne Tillery Renshaw, June 1, 1921, in H. P. Lovecraft
Selected Letters I (1911–1924), ed. August Derleth and Donald Wandrei
(Sauk City, Wisconsin: Akham House, 1965), 134.
60. Ibid., 87.
61. George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making
of the Gay Male World 1890–1940 (New York: Basic, 1994), 14–16.
62. Eric Haralson, Henry James and Queer Modernity (New York: Cambridge,
2003), 7.
63. S. T. Joshi, Explanatory Note to “The Hound,” 381.
64. Sigmund Freud, “Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood,” in
The Uncanny, trans., David McLintock (New York: Penguin, 2003), 60.
65. Ibid., 74.
66. About Lovecraft’s reading of Freud, Joshi notes, “it is not clear what work
of Freud’s (if any) Lovecraft had actually read; it is, in fact, more likely that
he had read various accounts of it in books or magazines.” See Joshi, I Am
Providence, 469.
68. H. P. Lovecraft to J. Vernon Shea, June 19, 1931, in H. P. Lovecraft
Selected Letters IV (1932–1934), ed. August Derleth and James Turner
(Sauk City, Wisconsin: Akham House, 1976), 234–35.
69. H. P. Lovecraft. “The Defense Reopens!,” in Collected Essays Volume 5:
278 B. JOHNSON
70. H. P. Lovecraft to Robert Barlow, 1935, in O Fortunate Floridian:

H.P. Lovecraft’s Letters to R.H. Barlow, ed. S.T. Joshi & David E. Schultz
(Tampa, FL: University of Tampa Press, 2007), 246–48.
71. Ibid., 648.
72. H. P. Lovecraft. “The Defense Reopens!,” in Collected Essays Volume 5:
74. H. P. Lovecraft, “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” in Collected Essays
Volume 2: Literary Criticism, ed. S. T. Joshi (New York: Hippocampus,
2004), 82.
75. Ibid., 83.
76. H. P. Lovecraft, “Beyond the Wall of Sleep,” in Eldritch Tales (London:
Gollancz, 2011), 50.
77. Lovecraft, “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” 84.
80. Sigmund Freud, “The Creative Writer and Daydreaming,” in The Uncanny,
trans., David McLintock (New York: Penguin, 2003), 30.
81. Ibid., 30.
83. Freud, “The Creative Writer and Daydreaming,” 30.
84. Lovecraft, “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” 82–84.
85. Ibid., 119.
86. H. P. Lovecraft. “The Defense Remains Open!,” in Collected Essays Volume
5: Philosophy, Autobiography & Miscellany, ed. S. T. Joshi (New York:
Index1
A Arkham House (publisher), 2, 38n8,

Abjection, 15, 22, 29, 37, 79, 127, 74n4, 175–177
134, 210, 217, 229, 265, 267, 270 Arnold, Mathew, 22, 23, 35, 146
Addison, Joseph, 18, 24–26, 35 Atmosphere, 2–6, 16, 22, 30, 32, 33,
Adler, Alfred, 62, 66, 74n4 78, 104, 131, 140, 158, 197,
Aesthetics, 3, 4, 7, 8, 13, 21–23, 25, 216, 223, 239–241, 243, 244
33–36, 43, 45, 47, 54, 106, Lovecraft’s conception of, 2, 4, 5,
117–119, 127, 137, 138, 140, 16, 22, 33, 104, 131, 140,
142, 144–149, 158, 163, 167, 158, 223, 243
168, 172, 174, 184, 191, 203, At the Mountains of Madness
221, 235–250, 261, 263–267, (Lovecraft), 81, 164, 196,
271, 272, 274 221, 251n10
Affect, 3, 7, 15, 18, 19, 31, 45, 113, Awe
114, 117–119, 191, 194, 202, 228 cosmic, 16, 17, 19, 28, 29
Affective theory, 118 vs. horror, 19, 28, 29, 48, 49, 53, 56
Agency detection, 44, 50–52 religious, 28, 29
Alien (Scott), 227, 236
Angel Heart (Parker), 237, 245–247
Ansky, S., 7, 61–73 B
See also Dybbuk, The Barlow, R. H., 28, 271
Anxiety, 3, 13, 14, 33, 46, 47, 49, 50, Barrett, Justin, 51
88, 117–119, 133, 260, 274 Barron, Laird, 49, 182
1
Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95477-6
280 INDEX
Bataille, Georges, 103, 104 Clark, Lilian D., 159

Baudelaire, Charles, 7, 127, 136–144, Clifford, William Kingdon, 16, 17, 19,
148, 149, 152n28, 265 32, 38n8
Beauvoir, Simone de, 42n82, 215 Cognition, 46, 49
Bergson, Henri, 8, 196 Cognitive psychology, 57
“Beyond the Wall of Sleep” “Colour Out of Space, The”
(Lovecraft), 204 (Lovecraft), 81, 214, 249
Bible, the, 49, 106, 108 Consilience, 43, 57
Biology, 34, 43, 53 Conspiracy Against the Human Race
Birkhead, Edith, 103, 155 (Ligotti), 42n88
Bizarre, the, 8, 74n3, 164, 192–200, Cook, W. Paul, 1, 159, 174
202–204, 206, 207, 221 Cosmicism, 5, 8, 15, 18, 79,
as experiential and literary 159, 223
category, 199 “Count Magnus” (James), 161
Blackwood, Algernon, 8, 18, 19, 156, Creed, Barbara, 215
158–160, 163–165, 167, 168, Cthulhu Mythos, 82, 84, 85, 92, 168,
172, 182, 183, 202, 237, 250n5 183, 228
Blair Witch Project, The
(Myrinck/Sanchez), 119, 244
Brockden Brown, Charles, 29 D
Brummell, George Bryan, 134–136, “Dagon” (Lovecraft), 2, 81, 204,
138–141, 143–145, 148, 216, 225
149, 150n1 Dandyism, 7, 127–149
Burke, Edmund, 20, 22–24, 27–30, 35 Danse Macabre (King), 2, 7, 20,
Burleson, Donald R., 82 77–81, 84–86, 92, 93, 94n11
Butler, Judith, 254 Darwin, Charles, 38n16
Byron, Lord (George Gordon), 135, Decadence, 136, 143, 149, 261–271
138, 141 de Camp, L. Sprague,
132–134, 138, 171
De la Mare, Walter, 8, 164, 165, 167
C Del Toro, Guillermo, 166
“Call of Cthulhu, The” (Lovecraft), Deleuze, Gilles, 8, 36
78–86, 89, 95n43, 103, 120, Democritus, 3, 31
164, 201, 251n12, 274 Derie, Bobby, 256, 257
Campbell, Joseph, 82, 83 Derleth, August, 40n53, 81, 140, 163,
Carpenter, John, 243, 251n17 175, 176, 183, 264
Carroll, Noël, 48, 49, 116, 117, 119, Dismorphmythic, the, 33–34, 210
125n52, 241, 250n3 Dracula (Stoker), 177, 212
Carter, Angela, 8, 209–230 Dread, 2, 6, 14, 17, 20, 78, 104, 106,
Castle of Otranto, The (Walpole), 108, 110, 116, 119, 120, 140,
29, 33, 49, 125n52, 211 173, 174, 179, 192, 198, 207,
Chaucer, Geoffrey, 105 221, 235–250, 273
INDEX
281
“Dreams in the Witch House, The” Foucault, Michel, 254, 259

(Lovecraft), 201, 210, Freeland, Cynthia, 241, 242, 244,
214, 251n12 245, 250, 250n3
Dunsany, Lord, 8, 155–160, 162–166, Freud, Sigmund, 7, 26, 39n34, 61–73,
168, 266 258, 260, 261, 263, 268, 269,
“Dunwich Horror” (Lovecraft), 271–274
81, 192, 210, 214, 215, 228, Fuseli, Henry, 235, 236
256, 274 Future of an Illusion, The (Freud),
Dwyer, Bernard Austin, 31 7, 61–73
Dybbuk, The, 7, 61–73
G
E Gaiman, Neil, 166, 209
Eerie, the (vs. the weird), 238 Galpin, Alfred, 31, 33, 130, 132,
See also Fisher, Mark 262, 267
Eliot, T. S., 4, 21, 22, 28, 145, Gautier, Théophile, 128, 138, 140,
157, 263 141, 144–146
Emotion, 3, 4, 7, 16–20, 22, 28, 29, Gelder, Ken, 103
32, 36, 38n8, 44–50, 53, 55, 56, Gentleman, 127–137, 141, 148, 149,
62, 78, 80, 105, 110, 111, 222, 265
113–120, 139, 193, 195, 242, Ghost stories, 6, 52, 114, 159, 161,
243, 272, 273 164, 167, 168, 199, 203,
Epicureanism, 31, 145, 147 225, 236
See also Epicurus; Lucretius Weird tales vs, 6, 203
Epicurus, 3, 27, 33 Giger, H. R., 236
Evolutionary psychology, 7, 44 Godwin, William, 29
Evolutionary social science, 43, 56, 57 Golem, golems, 67, 69
Exorcist, The (Friedkin), 45, 52, Good, John Mason, 14, 15, 18, 25,
71, 245, 250n5 28, 35, 37n6
Gothic fiction, 27, 45, 201, 253
Gould, George M., 14–20, 23, 25,
F 28, 29, 35
“Fall of the House of Usher, Goya, Francisco, 235
The” (Poe), 201 “Great God Pan, The” (Machen),
Feminine, femininity 157, 159, 173, 200
in Lovecraft’s fictions, 8, 217
in SHL, 8
Feminism H
feminist criticism of Lovecraft, 8 Haeckel, Ernst, 3, 26
feminist fiction, 8 Hanich, Julian, 242, 243
Fisher, Mark, 8, 238, 239 Harman, Graham, 36, 249
Fly, The (Cronenberg), 45 Harris, Woodburn, 33
282 INDEX
Hartwell, David G., 2, 3 I

Haunting of Hill House, I Am Legend (Matheson), 45
The (Jackson), 204 Idealism, idealist philosophy, 39n34,
Hill of Dreams, The (Machen), 157 127, 261, 264
Hills, Matt, 117–119 “In Defence of Dagon”
Hitchcock, Alfred, 45 (Lovecraft), 142
Hodgson, William Hope, 18, 172 Irony, 127, 139, 144–146, 148, 149,
Homophobia, 9, 133, 134, 255, 256, 184, 217, 240, 246, 269
258–260, 262–271 It Follows(Mitchell), 245, 247–249
Homosexuality, 134, 258–260, 264,
265, 269–271
Horror, 2, 7, 13–20, 22, 23, 25, 26, J
28–34, 36, 37, 39n34, 44, 57, Jackson, Shirley, 178, 182, 204
77–93, 103, 106, 115, 119, 161, Jacobs, W. W., 80, 165
173, 177, 181, 183, 205 James, Henry, 203–205
and abjection, 22, 29, 37, 210, 265 James, M. R., 8, 156, 159, 161,
art- (Carroll), 49, 114–120 163–165, 167, 168
cosmic; Gould on, 18–20; Lovecraft James, William, 17, 27, 29, 32
on, 7, 13–20, 22, 23, 25, 26, Jones, Mark, 85, 90, 182
28, 29, 31–34, 36, 37, 39n34, Joshi, S. T., 2, 3, 6, 8, 9n1, 18, 19,
77–93, 115, 161, 173, 177, 79, 85, 130–133, 143, 171, 182,
181, 183, 205 183, 213, 237, 238, 251n12,
literature/fiction of; Medieval, 7, 262–266, 269
103; modern, 2, 14, 25, 30, Jung, Carl G., 62, 63,
44, 57, 106, 115, 119 65–68, 74n4–6
“mere” (Lovecraft), 20, 22, 36, 211
natural (Carroll), 114, 116, 241
vs. terror (Radcliffe), (King), 20, 26 K
“Horror Boom”, 2, 30 Kafka, Franz, 177, 202–205
Horror films Kant, Immanuel, 8, 16, 20, 22–25,
adaptations of Lovecraft, 238 27, 28, 33, 35
Lovecraft on, 8, 78, 81, 86, 90–93, Kelly, Michael, 182
236–239, 244, 249 Kempe, Margery, 110
“Hound, The” (Lovecraft), Kiernan, Caitlín R., 8, 36, 179, 183,
143, 261–271 209–230
House on the Borderland, The King of Elfland’s Daughter, The
(Hodgson), 18 (Dunsany), 162, 166
“Houses Under the Sea” (Kiernan), King, Stephen, 2, 7, 20, 30,
222, 223, 226 77–93, 177
Howard, Robert E., 180 Kristeva, Julia, 22, 39n34, 134,
Huysmans, Joris-Karl, 128, 140, 141, 150n2, 210, 216, 241
143, 145, 146, 265 Kruuk, Hans, 47, 48
INDEX
283
L M
Lacan, Jacques, 151n13 Mabbott, T. O., 156, 168n3
Lamb, Charles, 192 MacCormack, Patricia, 36
Langan, John, 88, 96n62 Machen, Arthur, 8, 18, 155–160,
Le Fanu, Sheridan, 180 162–168, 172, 173, 200, 211,
Leiber, Fritz, 95n48, 163 231n16, 231n17, 266
Leonard, William Ellery, Magic Toyshop, The (Carter), 218, 229
31, 40n53, 269 Mamatas, Nick, 178
Leucippus, 3 Masculinity
Lewis, Matthew, 30, 31, 72 Lovecraft and, 7, 127, 131, 134,
“Ligeia” (Poe), 206 136, 139, 260–262
Ligotti, Thomas, 14, 17, 29, 37, in Lovecraft’s fiction, 127
37n5, 38n14, 41n61, 42n88, 54, Materialism
177, 179 mechanistic, 19
Long, Frank Belknap, 101, 121n1, philosophical, 3, 39n34, 274
157, 165, 213, 232n22, 262, 265 Matheson, Richard, 45
Longinus (Pseudo-Longinus), “Medusa’s Coil” (Lovecraft and
25, 26, 35 Bishop), 210, 215, 231n10
See also Sublime, the Metempsychosis, 61, 62
Lovecraft, H. P., 1, 13, 43, 61, 77–93, Middle Ages, the, 7, 68, 101–120
101, 127–149, 155–168, 171, Midsummer Night’s Dream, A
191, 209–230, 235, 238, 254 (Shakespeare), 51
biographies about, 127, 128, Miéville, China, 13, 18, 21, 23,
139, 148 (see also de Camp, 38n19, 183
L. Sprague; Joshi, S. T.) Milton, John, 28, 35
critical works about, 1 Mist, The (Darabont), 78, 81, 86, 91,
cultural and political views of, 5, 9, 92, 97n80
33, 128, 132, 139, 141–143, “Mist, The” (King), 78, 80, 85–93,
173, 183, 262, 263 93n3, 95n51
life of, 2, 182, 257 Modernism, 13
Lovecraftian, 8, 18–20, 22, 72, 78, culture, 21, 114
80, 82, 83, 85–87, 92, 93, 93n3, in literature, 13 (see also Eliot, T. S.;
97n80, 149, 161, 176, 178, 184, Pound, Ezra)
196, 204, 210, 212, 215, 227, Lovecraft on, 173, 263, 264
236–239, 257 in visual art, 236
See also Lovecraft, H. P. “Monkey’s Paw, The” (Jacobs),
Loves of Lady Purple, The (Carter), 80, 165
218, 229 Monsters, 24, 25, 34, 44, 47–50,
Lucretius (Titus Lucretius Carus) 52–54, 57, 79, 80, 82, 85, 87,
Leonard, William Ellery, 40n53 89, 91, 92, 97n81, 116, 117,
Lovecraft on, 6, 13, 25, 26, 31, 33 134, 160, 218, 224, 238,
See also Epicureanism; Good, John 240–243, 245, 247, 252n18,
Mason 255, 256, 265
284 INDEX
Moore, Alan, 257, 275n17 Poe, Edgar Allan, 4, 9n4, 18, 21, 22,
Moore, Catherine L., 213 30, 32, 37n6, 41n66, 49, 59n27,
Moreno-Garcia, Silvia, 8, 34, 41n79, 64, 72, 78, 146, 156, 165, 168,
42n80, 215, 231n4, 231n7, 171, 172, 193–195, 201, 203,
231n8, 232n46, 234n92, 206, 208n23, 217, 237, 250n5,
234n103, 234n106, 234n107 254, 266, 276n31
Moskowitz, Sam, 174, 175, 185n7 Poole, W. Scott, 183, 187n22
Pound, Ezra, 20, 21
Powers of Horror (Kristeva), 241
N Price, Robert M., 256–258, 275n10,
Natural selection, 52 275n18
Neuroscience, 44, 46, 49, 57 Prick of Conscience, The, 7, 101–108,
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 3, 8, 34, 38n16, 110, 112, 113, 115–120
204–206, 208n21, 263 Prometheus (Scott), 237
Nights at the Circus (Carter), 210, Psychoanalysis, 7, 44, 62, 63, 203, 272
218, 219, 229, 230 Psychology, 4, 7, 9, 32, 43–44, 46,
Nosferatu (Murnau), 45, 236 54, 57, 62–65, 69, 74n4, 74n6,
“Notes on Writing Weird Fiction” 87, 147, 193, 205, 270–272
(Lovecraft), 29, 161 Pulp magazines, 172, 174
Novel of the Black Seal (Machen), 211
“Nyarlathotep” (Lovecraft), 78–85
Q
Queer Gothic, 254, 255
O Queer, queerness, 9, 162, 253–274
Oates, Joyce Carol, 212, 213, Queer studies, 258, 259
217, 231n19, 231n20,
232n21, 233n55
Orientalism, 5 R
“Outsider, The” (Lovecraft), 164, 256 Racism, 181, 212, 214–216, 229, 254
Lovecraft and, 181, 214, 215,
223, 229
P Radcliffe, Ann, 20, 27–31,
Pascal, Blaise, 14 41n65, 41n66
Personality (psychology), 4, 22, 55, Rawlik, Peter, 83, 95n30, 95n34
56, 158, 199 Religion, 4, 27–29, 35, 44, 51,
Philosophy of Horror, The (Carroll), 63, 91, 146, 160, 198,
116, 241 216, 228, 230
Phobia, 44, 52–54, 65, 66 “Rats in the Walls, The”(Lovecraft),
“Pickman’s Model” (Lovecraft), 111, 204, 214, 272
47, 48 Return, The (De La Mare), 164
Picture of Dorian Gray, The (Wilde), Rice, Anne, 177
141, 146, 148 Rolle, Richard, 109, 110, 123n32,
Plato, 62 123n33, 123n35
INDEX
285
S modernist, 6, 13, 21, 264, 271

Schulz, Bruno, 177 Sublimity
Schulz, Charles, 184 cosmic horror and, 22–24, 28,
Scott, Sir Walter, 21, 29, 30, 32, 41n66 32, 37
Sederholm, Carl, 37n2 vs. the sublime, 22, 23
Sedgwick, Eve, 254, 259, 260, 263 Supernatural Horror in Literature
Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos (SHL; Lovecraft)
(Derie), 256 atmosphere in, 2–4, 104, 243
Sexuality critical assessments of, 1–9
Lovecraft and, 134, 172, 212, 238, Lcosmicism in, 8, 79
252n28, 255, 258, 261, 274 Supernatural Horror in Literature
in Lovecraft’s fiction, 195, 196, (Lovecraft; SHL) emotion and
198, 201 affect in, 8, 104, 105
“Shadow Over Innsmouth, The” the weird in, 43, 171–184, 273
(Lovecraft), 81, 196, 210, 212,
214, 216, 225, 256, 257
Shakespeare, William, 51, 224 T
Shea, J. Vernon, 164, 255, 270 “Temple, The” (Lovecraft), 204
Shelley, Mary W., 30, 37n6, Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, 14, 88
125n52, 250n5 Thing, The (Carpenter), 243, 251n17
Shelley, Percy B., 35 Tolkien, J. R. R., 155, 166
She Walks in Shadows (Moreno-Garcia “Tomb, The” (Lovecraft), 164, 204
and Stiles), 8, 210, 215, Touponce, William F., 4, 9n11
218, 226–230 “Tradition and the Individual Talent”,
“Shining Pyramid, The” 4, 22
(Machen), 162 True Detective (Pizzolatto), 54
Sidgwick, Henry, 16 Turn of the Screw, The (James), 199,
Silence of the Lambs, The (Demme), 45 203, 205
Smith, Clark Ashton, 95n48 Turzillo, Mary, 210, 211, 228,
Solomon, Robert C., 114 231n7, 234n104
Spencer, Herbert, 16
Spinoza, Baruch, 194, 195, 202, 203
Stableford, Brian, 14, 19, 22 U
Stiles, Paula R., 8 “Unity of Effect”, 4, 22
Stoker, Bram, 212 See also Poe, Edgar Allan
Straub, Peter, 50, 95n48
Sublime, the
Burkean, 5, 20, 22, 23, 28 V
Kantian, 16, 18, 22, 23, 26, 27, 34, VanderMeer, Ann, 5, 9n15, 38n20,
148, 206 179–181, 186n14
Longinian, 25, 26, 35 VanderMeer, Jeff, 5, 6, 9n15,
Lucretian, 24–26, 34–37, 39n34, 38n20, 179, 180,
41n65 186n14–16, 186n18
286 INDEX
W Weird Tales (magazine), 6, 164, 174,

Wagner, Wendy, 210, 211, 228, 177, 180, 181
231n8, 234n105 Weird, The (VanderMeer), 5, 6, 179,
Wagner-Jauregg, Julius, 64, 65, 73n2 180, 183
Walpole, Horace, 29, 32, 33, 41n63, White People, The (Machen),
49, 125n52, 231n14, 253 160, 211
Wandrei, Donald, 151n9, 152n25, Wilde, Oscar, 8, 127, 128,
152n30, 169n5, 175, 176, 133, 134, 140, 141,
232n26, 276n32, 277n58 145, 146, 150n1, 153n41,
Watson, John B., 7, 61–73 215, 232n43, 253, 261,
Weinstock, Jeffrey Andrew, 13, 37n2, 263–266, 270
42n86 “Willows, The” (Blackwood), 18, 158,
Weird 160, 167
definitions of, 6 Wilson, E. O., 57, 57n2
vs. the Eerie, 8, 238 Wilson, Edmund, 155, 168n1,
fiction, 2, 3, 5, 6, 8, 44, 45, 54, 56, 168n2, 185n1
57, 69, 93, 115, 147, 156, Winter, Douglas E., 45, 58n6,
159, 161, 163, 165, 167, 86, 87, 89, 95n51,
168, 171–184, 191, 241, 96n58, 96n61, 96n63,
249, 272, 273 96n66, 96n67, 96n69

Sean Moreland - New Directions in Supernatural Horror Literature The Critical Influence of H. P. Lovecraft

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Sean Moreland - New Directions in Supernatural Horror Literature The Critical Influence of H. P. Lovecraft

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ISBN 978-3-319-95476-9 ISBN 978-3-319-95477-6 (eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018954728

Cover illustration: zhengzaishuru / iStock / Getty Images

1 Introduction: The Critical (After)Life of Supernatural

Section I “The Oldest and Strongest Emotion”: The

2 The Birth of Cosmic Horror from the S(ub)lime of

3 The Evolution of Horror: A Neo-­Lovecraftian Poetics 43

4 Ansky’s The Dybbuk, Freud’s Future of an Illusion,

5 Gazing Upon “The Daemons of Unplumbed Space” with

Section II “A Literature of Cosmic Fear”: Lovecraft,

6 “Lothly Thinges Thai Weren Alle”: Imagining Horror in

7 Lovecraft’s Debt to Dandyism 127

8 Lovecraft and the Titans: A Critical Legacy 155

9 Reception Claims in Supernatural Horror in Literature

Section III “The True Weird”: (Re)Defining the Weird 189

10 Bizarre Epistemology, Bizarre Subject: A Definition of

11 Speaking the Unspeakable: Women, Sex, and the

12 Weird Cinema and the Aesthetics of Dread 235

13 Paranoia, Panic, and the Queer Weird 253

Alissa Burger is Assistant Professor of English and Director of Writing

neuroscience. His monograph Why Horror Seduces (2018) investigates

Helen Marshall is a critically acclaimed author, editor, and medievalist.

Introduction: The Critical (After)Life

In 1925, writer and publisher W. Paul Cook (1881–1948) invited his

© The Author(s) 2018 1

in Lovecraft’s later career; one trajectory of this development, Lovecraft’s

Because of its insistence on atmosphere, Hartwell claims SHL is “the

The world and all its inhabitants impress me as immeasurably insignificant,

Hardly a disinterested survey, SHL is Lovecraft’s attempt to think

and subtler symmetries” as an elementary, “if not always universal” (21),

Anglo-­Saxon examples emphasize their insufficient seriousness and cosmi-

A “weird tale,” as defined by H. P. Lovecraft in his nonfiction writings and

This suggests the difficulty, or perhaps impossibility, of working with the

and Wilde. S. T. Joshi’s “Lovecraft and the Titans: A Critical Legacy”

“The Oldest and Strongest Emotion”:

The Birth of Cosmic Horror

Cosmic Horror: A Terrible Sublime

In an exchange with scholar Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, China Miéville

© The Author(s) 2018 13

foundations of the Enlightenment, Romantic, and Victorian discourse on

Ghosts and Goulds: Cosmic Horror

As Brian Stableford notes, “the notion of ‘cosmic horror’ is closely associ-

wrote of his a sense of being ‘engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces

The Enlightenment saw a proliferation of writings about the affective

What is the aggregate opinion, or the aggregate importance of the whole

Published in 1826, Good’s description of cosmicism resembles Lovecraft’s

By a cosmic emotion—the phrase is Mr. Henry Sidgwick’s—I mean an emo-

The two things I contemplate with ceaseless awe:

Clifford’s cosmic emotion is a version of the Kantian sublime influenced

only a base material that “man’s sense of law” sublimates by affective

A Morbid Metaphysics: Lovecraftian Cosmic Horror

from, natural sublimity, in which “delight of the wild beauty” mingles

mechanistic materialism. The term postulates two ontological hypotheses:

“To Resuscitate the Dead Art”: Howard

On first glance, Miéville’s characterization of Lovecraft’s work as “mod-

The one form of literary appeal which I consider absolutely unsound,

estimation of Poe. “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919) claims

“We Survey a Dead Monster”: Lovecraft, Addison,

In Anne Janowitz’s words, “Eye, telescope, and imagination can just

In contrast to Longinian theodicy, the Lucretian sublime posits, in Most’s

The Cancer of Superstition: Lucretius’s Bastards

Lucretius insists that belief in such supernatural conceits as immortal

The crude human animal is ineradicably superstitious, and there is every

1 Introduction: The Critical (After)Life of Supernatural

Section I “The Oldest and Strongest Emotion”: The

2 The Birth of Cosmic Horror from the S(ub)lime of

3 The Evolution of Horror: A Neo-Lovecraftian Poetics 43

4 Ansky’s The Dybbuk, Freud’s Future of an Illusion,

5 Gazing Upon “The Daemons of Unplumbed Space” with

Section II “A Literature of Cosmic Fear”: Lovecraft,

6 “Lothly Thinges Thai Weren Alle”: Imagining Horror in

7 Lovecraft’s Debt to Dandyism 127

8 Lovecraft and the Titans: A Critical Legacy 155

9 Reception Claims in Supernatural Horror in Literature

Section III “The True Weird”: (Re)Defining the Weird 189

10 Bizarre Epistemology, Bizarre Subject: A Definition of

11 Speaking the Unspeakable: Women, Sex, and the

12 Weird Cinema and the Aesthetics of Dread 235

13 Paranoia, Panic, and the Queer Weird 253

Anglo-Saxon examples emphasize their insufficient seriousness and cosmi-

mundanely gruesome” as well as those targeted by weird stories. “Horror,”

‘merciful ignorance’—the theme that there are species of knowledge only