What do you think of when you think of horror?
Do you think of slasher films with crazy lunatics in masks dismembering poor, innocent victims as they run through haunted houses and creepy forests?
Do you think of paranormal beings wreaking havoc on places or people?
For me, the number one thing that comes to mind when I think of horror is the unmistakably macabre writings of H.P. Lovecraft. His writings, like those of Edgar Allen Poe, are unparalleled by modern authors which is why he is revered as one of the greatest writers of horror.
Let’s get one thing quite clear, I am an absolute wuss when it comes to horror. Movies like Saw, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Friday the 13th, etc., have never tickled my fancy.
This, likewise, extended to my literature intake as well. Even Stephen King’s books never came into my possession. Until I attended university, the whole of my horror reading could be summed up in four Edgar Allen Poe stories I read in high school: The Raven, The Tell-tale Heart, The Fall of the House of Usher, and The Cask of Amontillado. When I read those, I wasn’t necessarily filled with horror, but rather the dread of being forced to read his works by my teachers.
Naturally, when my literary scope expanded to reading what I wanted to read rather than what I was assigned to read, my eyes were always attracted to my favorite topic: history. However, when I was perusing the internet, I came across a few videos on Lovecraft. The moment they started to quote his writings I was hooked. There was something attractive in the deliberate and expert use of language. Expert wordsmiths who know how to utilize language to its fullest are akin to the genius composers of music i.e., Mozart, Bach, and Beethoven. Lovecraft is certainly one of these, and someone I believe ought to be on par with literary powerhouses like Dostoevsky, Hugo, and Melville.
To further explain my stance on this I’d like to use some passages from Lovecraft’s works:
“He had said the geometry of the dream-place he saw was abnormal, non-Euclidian, and loathsomely redolent of spheres and dimensions apart from ours… The very sun of heaven seemed distorted when viewed through the polarising miasma welling out from this sea-soaked perversion, and twisted where a second glance shewed concavity after the first shewed convexity.”
This, this is where I realized what a truly phenomenal writer Lovecraft was; his ability to describe imagery that itself, gives you a taste of insanity. Insanity is a common theme in many of Lovecraft’s writings, after all it’s something he was familiar with, suffering from mental breakdowns several times in his life along with witnessing similar occurrences with his mother and father.
Lovecraft’s best attribute in his writing is his ability to pull you into a world where constants are questioned; where the very fabric of reality seems to pull away and you are left questioning your own sanity by virtue of your ability to immerse yourself in such a world. Personally, the two works that impacted me the most in reading Lovecraft are the Music of Erich Zann and The Colour out of Space. Both of these stories did something different and yet so impactful; they took sound and color and made it horrifying! From the Music of Erich Zann, I felt electric waves of fear and anxiety race up and down my spine and from the colour out of space I found myself in awe of being afraid of a color.
“Then one night as I listened at the door, I heard the shrieking viol swell into a chaotic babel of sound; a pandemonium which would have led me to doubt my own shaking sanity had there not come from behind that barred portal a piteous proof that the horror was real— the awful, inarticulate cry which only a mute can utter, and which rises only in moments of the most terrible fear or anguish.”
“All the farm was shining with the hideous unknown blend of colour; trees, buildings, and even such grass and herbage as had not been wholly changed to lethal grey brittleness… It was a scene from a vision of Fuseli, and over all the rest reigned that riot of luminous amorphousness, that alien and undimensioned rainbow of cryptic poison from the well— seething, feeling, lapping, reaching, scintillating, straining, and malignly bubbling in its cosmic and unrecognizable chromaticism… Yet the outcome was the same, for in one feverish, kaleidoscopic instant there burst up from that doomed and accursed farm a gleamingly eruptive cataclysm of unnatural sparks and substance; blurring the glance of the few who saw it, and sending forth to the zenith a bombarding cloudburst of such coloured and fantastic fragments as our universe must needs disown.”
Like I said… terrifying!
I’m sure that many out there who are horror fans whether it be cinematic horror or literary usually place themselves in the spectrum of too smart or clever or innocent to avoid such calamities that befall victims in these stories. And I think that’s what is so tremendously terrifying in Lovecraft, his horror brings you to question reality itself. It’s a fight of cosmic proportions that the truths we know and hold dear to can be stripped away and you, left a shell of your old self, alone and too far gone to contemplate the moment in which your mental faculties had left you. It almost seemingly becomes a battle against yourself and that makes every story personal.
