Writers must be readers. And the good ones read the sort of thing they want to write. I had an idea for a Cthulhu-cozy murder mystery and thus spent the last several months reading lots of H.P. Lovecraft. What did I learn about Lovecraft’s brand of weird fiction?

Clear Communication? Not So Much

Lovecraft stories’ appeal is based on the imaginative world presented, the intricate building of tension, and the sheer fright value of the uncanny and horrific events of the tale. 

However, most of Mr. Lovecraft’s stories would have been pummeled in a twenty-first century writers’ workshop. Character arc development is rudimentary, although the stories do a good job of creating unique voices for each character.

The stories are typically heavy on exposition—a narrator tells the reader stuff—compared to scene—the reader sees several people doing, talking about, and reacting physically to each other and events. This pattern is called an info dump: a whole bunch of backstory or facts about the world just laid out with little reader engagement.

And Lovecraft tales aren’t action-packed, by any means. Typically a lone protagonist explores, encounters, observes, and reacts. Then he (always a he) runs away and/or goes insane at the end. Language isn’t very accessible, and the issue isn’t just vocabulary but rather sentence construction. It is said H.P. Lovecraft considered himself a nineteenth century person. It shows in his published writing. (Gee, Kathy. How do you really feel?)

Show Some Appreciation

Yet the more Lovecraft I’ve read, the more I’ve come to appreciate the skill with which the stories’ uncanny worldview has wormed its way into my brain. I see tentacles everywhere I go and have existential crises on a daily basis. Some collective subconscious BS is clearly at work.

The stories I most enjoyed were: “Call of Cthulhu,” “Colour Out of Space,” “The Dunwich Horror,” “Whisperer In The Dark,” “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” “Herbert West: Reanimator,” “The Festival,” and “The Hound.”

Reading To Write

Artists in many genres are tapping the weird collective unconsciousness these days. To scry out my own weird vision, I noticed these tropes running through the stories I read:

• First-person narrators
• A confined person, often in an insane asylum, but sometimes in prison
• A disturbing, lonely, isolated setting
• Highly educated people, especially scientists, as protagonists
• Neutral, uncaring cosmos
• Vastly superior aliens
• A distinctive, evocative mood induced by the story atmosphere
• Switching of personalities, that is, a magic user of takes over a victim
• No ultimate morality based on a religious system
• World consistency across stories and inter-related stories
• The “story within a story”— We are reading a story in which someone tells another story.
• Physical actions take place off stage
• The importance of the past, generations of family, and inheritances
• Degeneration of individuals, families, and communities
• Inferiority and superiority based on cultures and physiology

The Art Versus the Man

H.P. Lovecraft corresponded with many people through the years, so we don’t have to infer his attitudes and opinions from his fiction. Lovecraft was an early twentieth century, upper-class, educated, European-descended, straight white American male who considered himself a throw-back to the nineteenth century. And apparently, his attitudes toward most people different from himself were even worse than many of his contemporaries. 

Those attitudes color Lovecraft’s tales, some more than others. So even if those of us who consider art to be a separate entity from the artist must deal with the offensive attitudes, phrases, plotlines, and themes that appear in Lovecraft’s stories. (And it’s not just an issue with Lovecraft. The casual racism and misogyny of the past is a real problem with many “classics.”)

Weird New Directions

“New Weird” writers currently enliven the literary scene with takes on the Lovecraftian legacy baked into weird fiction. Art made by people of color, women, and individuals of all sexual orientation can upturn old attitudes. These artists present weird horror from their own points of view and take the experience in new and exciting directions for readers and viewers. [following edit: 10/24/2019] And all writers can use their empathy, imagination, research, and simply listening to others to create diverse fictional words that honestly portray the life experiences of each character.

Such books I have read and recommend include Victor LaValle’s novella, Ballad of Black Tom and Matt Ruff’s story collection, Lovecraft Country. Other modern expressions of the Lovecraftian tropes can be found in James Lovegrove’s Cthulhu Casebooks Series and Cherie Priest’s Borden Dispatches books.

A Visual Arts Lesson

The only way to battle a bad idea is with a better idea.

Kehinde Wiley

Kehinde Wiley’s visual art creates a dialogue between past and present. He places modern individuals of color in settings formerly occupied by images of euro-centric power. His most recent work, “Rumors of War,” is an equestrian sculpture of a young black man in a heroic pose.  It will be placed in Richmond, Virginia, in an interesting juxtaposition with an image similar in appearance but totally different in intent: a southern US civil war monument. Wiley’s approach to dealing with good art that sprang from bad ideas reminds me of the modern generation of weird writers take on Lovecraft—find the solid aesthetic bones and build a new and improved structure on them.

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