The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories

by H.P. Lovecraft

This is the belief that the universe is a “mechanism” operating according to fixed laws (although these may not all be known to human beings), and that there can be no immaterial substance such as a soul or spirit. Such a view necessarily necessitates agnosticism or actual atheism, and Lovecraft was not slow in expressing his adherence to the latter:

In the mid-1920s Lovecraft was momentarily disturbed by the implications of Einstein’s relativity theory and Planck’s quantum theory, both of which were hailed by many as spelling the downfall of mechanistic materialism; but his later adherence to the materialism of Bertrand Russell, George Santayana, and

the notion of cosmicism, or the suggestion of the vast gulfs of space and time and the resultant inconsequence of the human species.

Now all my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large. To me there is nothing but puerility in a tale in which the human form—and the local human passions and conditions and standards—are depicted as native to other worlds or other universes. To achieve the essence of real externality, whether of time or space or dimension, one must forget that such things as organic life, good and evil, love and hate, and all such local attributes of a negligible and temporary race called mankind, have any existence at all.

. It also points to Lovecraft’s central place in the fusion of traditional weird fiction and the then-emerging genre of science fiction. A late utterance is highly significant in this regard:

“supernormal”; that is, the incidents portrayed in his later tales no longer defy natural law, but merely our imperfect conceptions of natural law. His later work, accordingly, could be said to be fully within the field of science fiction aside from its manifest intent to incite fear.

These devices—including a wide array of extraterrestrials (deemed “gods” by their human followers); an entire library of mythical books containing the “forbidden” truths about these “gods”; and a fictionalized New England landscape analogous to Hardy’s Wessex or Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County—are certainly found abundantly in Lovecraft’s later tales and lend them a kind of thematic unity not found in other work of their kind.

“anti-mythology”: whereas most of the religions and mythologies in human history seek to reconcile human beings with the cosmos by depicting a close, benign relationship between man and god,

Lovecraft’s pseudomythology brutally shows that man is not the center of the universe, that the “gods” care nothing for him, and that the earth and all its inhabitants are but a momentary incident in the unending cyclical chaos of the universe.

to escape the overriding influence of his earliest mentor, Edgar Allan Poe. As Lovecraft’s “God of Fiction” (SL I.20), Poe inevitably hangs heavy over such early works as “The Tomb” (1917) and “The Outsider” (1921).

output declined dramatically after 1920. More to the point, Lovecraft learned from Dunsany how to enunciate his philosophical, aesthetic, and moral conceptions by means of fiction.

Put very simply, Lovecraft’s style is a melding of scientific realism and evocative prose-poetry. One is certainly free to dislike the style and to prefer the spareness of Hemingway or Sherwood Anderson; but it would be difficult to deny its appropriateness for Lovecraft’s type of imaginative effect.

There may be those who banish all weird fiction into a kind of literary purgatory, but the achievements of Edgar Allan Poe, Ambrose Bierce, Lord Dunsany, Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, H. P. Lovecraft, Shirley Jackson, and Ramsey Campbell are making this increasingly difficult to do.

The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

I think that the professor, too, intended to keep silent regarding the part he knew, and that he would have destroyed his notes had not sudden death seized him.

resolved to search out the eccentric sculptor responsible for this apparent disturbance of an old man’s peace of mind.

If I say that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature, I shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing. A pulpy, tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary wings; but