H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard
Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937) and Robert E. Howard (1906-1936) are two pillars in the New World Gothic castle of fantastic fiction. They are especially interesting in their surprising aspects. They both died young, they both lived sheltered and geographically-constricted lives, they both absorbed influences from wide and deep sources which they then used to create wonderfully complex and vast universes that they have shared with writers long after their passing, and they both lived for sharing their creative energies with other writers through letters and encouraging words, including each other.
Lovecraft the New Englander drew from Poe, Machen, and Dunsany to fashion the crucible from which his Cthulhu Mythos emerged, the indifferent and destructive universe of what humans would call monsters from beyond space and time. He was a master at delineating the gulf between what terrible fate was suggested and why it could not be described in all its horror.
Robert E. Howard the Texan connected to semi-mythic history and the existential journey of one determined man through all the dangers of men and beasts. He is the father of an American sword and sorcery, a juxtaposition of power that seems illogical but also somehow inevitable, almost an allegory of the wars of the 20th Century -- what you cannot see may kill you from afar, and what you can see may kill you up close. The survivor must be ready and skilled and wary at all times.
The legacies of these two writers last and grow to this day in literature, art, and film, even language. We stock their writings and associated contemporary writers as well as some of the more interesting and provocative writers working with the generous heritage that Lovecraft and Howard bequeathed to an increasingly uneasy world.
Supernatural Horror in Literature
Supernatural Horror in Literature
H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937), the most important American supernaturalist since Poe, has had an incalculable influence on all the horror-story writing of recent decades. Although his supernatural fiction has of late been enjoying an unprecedented fame, it is still not widely known that he wrote a critical history of supernatural horror in literature that has yet to be superseded as the finest historical discussion of the genre. This extraordinary work is presented in this volume in its final, revised text.
With incisive penetration and power, Lovecraft here formulates the aesthetics of supernatural horror, and summarizes in masterful fashion the range of its literary expression from primitive folklore to the tales of his own 20th-century masters. Following a discussion of terror-literature in ancient, medieval and renaissance culture, he launches on a critical survey of the whole history of horror fiction from the Gothic school of the 18th century (when supernatural horror finally found its own genre) to the time of De la Mare and M. R. James. The Castle of Otranto, Radcliffe, "Monk" Lewis, Fathek, Charles Brockden Brown, Melmoth the Wanderer, Frankenstein, Bulwer-Lytton, Fongué's Undine, Wuthering Heights, Poe (an entire chapter), The House of the Seven Gables, de Maupassant's Horla, Bierce, The Turn of the Screw, M. P. Shiel, W. H. Hodgson, Machen, Blackwood, and Dunsany are among the authors and works discussed in depth. Lovecraft also notices a host of lesser supernatural writers — enough to draw up an extensive reading list.
By charting so completely the background for his own concepts of horror and literary techniques, Lovecraft throws light on his own fiction as well as on the horror literature which has followed in his influential wake. For this reason this book will be especially intriguing to those who have read and enjoyed Lovecraft's fiction as an isolated phenomenon. These and other readers, searching for a guide through the inadequately marked region of literary horror, need search no further. New introduction by E. F. Bleiler.
Reprint of the 1945 edition.