Cover Barnes & Noble Collectible Classics: Omnibus Edition, hardcover 2016

(2) H.P. LOVECRAFT – CHTHULU MYTHOS

Does any other literary fantasy or SF mythology have the pre-eminence, or even more so capture the paranoid modern zeitgeist, as Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos?

Lovecraft took the worldview of modern science and turned it into a source of cosmic horror, creating that genre of fantasy or SF horror.

“His famous cosmology, created almost single-handedly, did not celebrate science and progress, but was instead full of otherworldly monsters and blind, raving deities…all of his work resonates with the terror of the newly-discovered magnitude of the universe…Einstein’s theory of relativity opened a door into teleportation, time travel, and alien geometry, and radically altered peoples’ notion of space-time itself, while the discovery of pre-Cambrian fossils and Wegener’s then-new-and-controversial hypothesis of continental drift brought the notion that the Earth was far older than previously believed…All of this was subtly addressed in Lovecraft’s stories of alien horror, and of the remains of ancient civilizations lost to the abyss of geological deep time”.

Our science and technology are but a candle held up to the storm – worse, as developed by writers using the Cthulhu Mythos such as Charles Stross, they may actually draw the notice of entities that were best left not noticing us (and tend to drive us mad if we notice them). Or, as Stross observed elsewhere, it was a potent metaphor for such terrors as Cold War fears of nuclear warfare – as almost otherworldly forces of destruction lurking beneath the surface ready to be unleashed by unfeeling beings.

Although in fairness, Cthulhu is taken out by a steamship to his head in his original appearance in The Call of Cthulhu. Try doing that with pre-industrial technology.

TV Tropes observes how Lovecraft’s cosmic horror is an inversion of the philosopher Leibniz’s optimism “that the entire world could be described by reason, and that this is the best of all possible worlds”. For Lovecraft, “each new discovery only increased humanity’s knowledge of its own ignorance and insignificance, encouraging a nihilistic atmosphere, and this is perhaps the central theme of Lovecraft’s incisive fiction”. Interestingly that same comparison between Leibniz’s “best of all possible worlds” and Lovecraft’s horror in James Morrow’s Blameless in Abaddon.

Lovecraft didn’t coin the term Cthulhu Mythos for his mythology – for that matter, I’m not sure how consistent or systematic his mythology was throughout his works. He was all about the vibe of it, with details changing between individual works. However, aptly enough, his creation had a life of its own, as developed and used by other writers, as encouraged by Lovecraft himself.

TV Tropes stated the premise of the Cthulhu Mythos best – “Humanity exists within a small flickering firelight of sanity and reason in a cold and utterly senseless universe full of ancient and terrible things with tentacles and too many eyes. Our science doesn’t properly describe the workings of the universe – ignorance really is bliss because even trying to understand the horrid truth of reality will surely drive you to madness. Our planet was owned by all manner of unknowable alien beings long before we crawled out of the primordial muck, and guess what? They want it back, which means doing a little pest control…”

It is for this mythology that Lovecraft ranks the second top spot of my special mentions – and more generally that he is “is considered perhaps both the greatest and most notorious of all American horror fiction writers, rivalled only by his idol Edgar Allan Poe”.

Fortunately, his mythology transcends Lovecraft himself, as there’s the matter of that notoriety – which remains for somewhat problematic reasons. There’s also the quality of his writing, with the style or execution of his prose often falling short of the dark grandeur of his cosmic horror – Lovecraft was notorious for his purple prose, and enthusiasm for more archaic expressions such as eldritch.

And then there is the fact that “much of his work is informed by a powerful fear and disgust for anything outside the limited sphere of an urban White Anglo-Saxon Protestant of his time” – or more bluntly, he “was “afraid of everything that wasn’t his home town of Providence, Rhode Island”.

Even so, his Cthulhu Mythos remains definitive for me of fantasy in general. As I noted in my previous entry, if I was to simply fantasy down to just two elements, it would be a fusion of fairy tale and the Cthulhu Mythos. Come to think of it, that’s not a bad description or tagline for The Lord of the Rings – fairy tale meets Cthulhu Mythos. If only Tolkien had written that essay…

RATING: 5 STARS*****

S-TIER (GOD-TIER – OR IS THAT CTHULHU-TIER?)