Hidden Gems: The Cthulhu Mythos of H. P. Lovecraft

American author HP Lovecraft is widely known nowadays, but far fewer people have actually read his work than have heard of him. Rightly celebrated now as one of the founding fathers of the horror genre, Lovecraft was a wildly imaginative fantasist who was at his height in the 1920s. Many of his stories fall far more easily into dark fantasy than they do into mainstream horror. A very few even classify as traditional fantasies in the early sense of being tales of wonder. But the true power and importance of Lovecraft’s stories comes from the pitilessly bleak mythology that he invented, and that underlays all his best work.

Lovecraft was a troubled, reclusive man, and his long-standing personal demons and his alienation from everyday life provided a foundation for everything he wrote. In the ‘Cthulhu Mythos’, as his mythology is now know, human life and civilisation is a tiny speck of light floating on unimaginable depths of darkness and horror. We are an aberration, suffered to survive only because the true masters of the cosmos have been locked out of existence for a short time. They are all-powerful, amoral forces of pure corruption and devastation. When the stars are right, they will return, and that day will see the world scoured clean of the careless infection that is life. Even now, banished from reality, their influence and agents sew chaos and misery amongst us, seeking ever to guide humanity to its destruction.

The Necronomicon by and (c) Marc Simonetti

In Lovecraft’s stories, the traces of evil can be seen and felt in wrongness — geometry that doesn’t work, places that have an inappropriate feel, people who have degenerated back towards primitive forms. Encountering this evil is incredibly dangerous; there are no ‘the hero whips out a gun and saves the day’ stories in his work. The usual results are madness and death.

Lovecraft’s stories have a cumulative power. The more of them you read, the more his world seeps into your bones, the more disturbing and unpleasant it becomes. Despite the broadly contemporary setting (for the time, anyway), they really aren’t quite set in our world. Lovecraft conjures vivid places, histories, institutions, artifacts and pieces of lore, then weaves them into reality so that the lines start blurring. It is this sense of hidden decay that really represents the mythos, rather than any primal god — and also why a book, the Necronomicon, is the aspect of the mythos that is most widely known.

There are plenty of problems with Lovecraft’s work, of course. His xenophobia and racism are almost comical to the modern eye. Ditto some of his more obscure vocabulary. He hated writing dialogue too, so almost all of his stories are presented through a narrator who tells you what is going on. Despite this, the sheer force of his vision makes him absolutely worth reading.

If you want to have a go, and haven’t read any Lovecraft before, I’d recommend:

The Shadow Over Innsmouth

The Dunwich Horror

The Whisperer in the Darkness

The Rats in the Walls

The Colour out of Space

Dreams in the Witch-House

At the Mountains of Madness (which is long),

and, once you’ve read at least one other story and got to grips with the style a bit, The Call of Cthulhu, which is probably his ’signature’ piece.