Peering in to the Darkness, Our first look at H.P. Lovecraft

Howard Phillips Lovecraft

Galactic Saviour, Visionary, Master of the Macabre

 

As you may have gathered, I have a reverence for the man above, he's sort of my literary Jesus, and by that I mean he saved me from dull and drab stories of grade school, and brought me into a world of untold horror and suspense that I find I enjoy so very much more. First off we'll start with a little background about the man, then I'll tell you about my first experience with this amazing author, finally, some more ranting about why I love his works so very very much. 

H.P. Lovecraft was born in late August in 1890, in the town of Providence, Rhode Island. He was the only child of his parents Winfield and Sarah Lovecraft, and by the time he was 8 his father had passed away due to complications from syphilis, and as was suggested by the author or his biography, young Howard was not aware of the true nature of his father's death, thinking instead he died as a result of "over exhaustion" due to the nature of his work. Lovecraft was a sickly child, as a result of his frequent illness he barely attended school until the age of eight and he was withdrawn from that the following year. Another thing plagued the youth, Night Terrors, a rare parasomnia disorder, in which he believed he was being assaulted by faceless devils he refered to as "Night Gaunts". In 1919, after dealing with depression and hysteria for a long period of time, Sarah Lovecraft was committed to the same hospital as her husband was 21 years prior, nevertheless Sarah and her son communicated through letters and remained close until her death in 1924.

Howard Lovecraft was referred to as prodigy as far as poetry was concerned, reading poetry at the age of three and composing and writing his own by age six. His grandfather encouraged his reading, and Lovecraft became quite a voracious reader, consuming the classics and articles of pulp fiction. In 1917 Lovecraft returned to writing fiction gave the world stories such as Dagon and The Tomb, the former being his first professionally-published work. 

That's enough of that, the man lead an interesting life, on top of being an amazing author he was was on the most prominent correspondents of his time, and if you're interested in finding out more about the man just take some time to read his biography or some articles about him and his many works online. 

 As I mentioned before, I would like to quickly talk about the story that I first read and what really got be hooked on the works of H.P. Lovecraft. Most of what I hear from folks when it comes to the story that broke that Lovecraft cherry it was one of his more well known and popular works, The Call of Cthulhu, Shadows Over Innsmouth, The Dunwhich Horror, or Into the Mountains of Madness, and don't get me wrong, those are all great stories, all among my favorites, however the work that got me was The Music of Erich Zann. The story is set in Paris, the main character, a student of metaphysics, is forced to take residence in a strange part of the city he has never seen before on a street named "Rue d'Auseil" which is not a true french word but was like derived from the phrase "au aeuil" which means "at the threshold" which make a lot of sense given the nature of the story. Any how, back to the story, the main character finds an apartment in an almost empty building. One night he hears one of the other residents, an old and mute German man named Erich Zann, playing a most strange melody on his viol. The main character approaches Zann and over time begins to gain the old man's trust and eventually he learns Erich's secret and the meaning of his wildly strange melodies. The old man has discovered melodies and rhythms of sound of an almost otherworldly nature, and he must play these sounds to keep ay bay unknown and unseen creatures from his window, which is said to look out into a black abyss, most likely some unknown dimension of horrible origin. I don't want to ruin the story, if you find yourself able to read it, please do, recently I've started doing readings of Lovecraft's works to online friends in preparation of potentially turning some of them into radio drama-esque podcasts.

I plan on future Lovecraft centric articles to discuss his influence on modern horror, video games, comics, and most anything otherworldly. Till then I'll leave you with a quote that I believe to be rather true:

"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents."