HP Lovecraft might seem an obvious choice for a Halloween-themed Sunday Read, but we can bet there are many things you didn’t know about the reclusive author who’s legacy’s inspired many a nightmarish tale long after his death on 15 March 1937.
Who was Howard Phillips Lovecraft, and why does he continue to haunt our stories today?
Born on 20 August 1890, Lovecraft was an only child. Both his parents suffered nervous breakdowns and were permanently admitted to Butler Hospital, from whence they never again emerged.
Lovecraft was a sickly child and, unable to finish high school, taught himself chemistry and astronomy and spent his days reading and writing. He wrote regular columns for astronomy magazines and ghost-wrote a story about Harry Houdini called “Under the Pyramids”. He also wrote stories for pulp magazine Weird Tales. Some of his best work include “The Call of Cthulhu” and “At the Mountains of Madness”, which he wrote in the decade just before his death.
He died of colon cancer in 1937.
For a complete biography and a comprehensive collection of Lovecraft’s writing, visit The H.P. Lovecraft Archive.
Also read:
Ten things you should know about HP Lovecraft
1. Both his mother and father were separately committed to the same mental institution
Winfield Scott Lovecraft was committed to Butler Hospital after being diagnosed with psychosis when HP Lovecraft was only three years old. He died in 1898, when HP was eight. To this day, rumours persist that Winfield had syphilis, but neither HP nor his mother ever displayed symptoms.
For this week’s Sunday Read, we bring you an excerpt from one of the author’s most famous and influential horror stories, “The Call of Cthulhu”:
(Found Among the Papers of the Late Francis Wayland Thurston, of Boston)
“Of such great powers or beings there may be conceivably a survival … a survival of a hugely remote period when … consciousness was manifested, perhaps, in shapes and forms long since withdrawn before the tide of advancing humanity … forms of which poetry and legend alone have caught a flying memory and called them gods, monsters, mythical beings of all sorts and kinds …” — Algernon Blackwood.
I.
The Horror in Clay.The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. 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.
Theosophists have guessed at the awesome grandeur of the cosmic cycle wherein our world and human race form transient incidents. They have hinted at strange survivals in terms which would freeze the blood if not masked by a bland optimism. But it is not from them that there came the single glimpse of forbidden aeons which chills me when I think of it and maddens me when I dream of it. That glimpse, like all dread glimpses of truth, flashed out from an accidental piecing together of separated things—in this case an old newspaper item and the notes of a dead professor. I hope that no one else will accomplish this piecing out; certainly, if I live, I shall never knowingly supply a link in so hideous a chain. 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.
Lovecraft’s weird alien creature Cthulhu and the world he created, Arkham, to this day continue to inspire popular culture. Arkham, for example, is the name of the asylum in Batman, and Cthulhu has even made an appearance in South Park where he eats Justin Bieber. He’s also inspired many a range of movies, computer and board games.
Lovecraft fans will be thrilled by the 2016 HP Lovecraft horror film, The Dark Below.
Watch the trailer (if you dare):
Click here to view the embedded video.
- Not loading? Watch on YouTube
Book details
- The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories by HP Lovecraft, illustrated by Travis Louie
EAN: 9780143106487
Find this book with BOOK Finder!
Image courtesy of The Atlantic