H. P. Lovecraft is best known for his short stories and elaborate mythos of eldritch gods and unspeakable horrors. But we sometimes forget that writers don’t create in a vacuum. Before being a world-famous writer of horror fiction, Lovecraft was first a fan of the genre, reading everything from his predecessors and contemporaries that he could get his hands on. Much like what I do here on The Gothic Library, Lovecraft put many hours into researching the history of the genre and developing his own philosophies about how to define, categorize, and evaluate it. The fruits of his labor became the essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” which was first published in 1927 in the one-issue magazine The Recluse and subsequently updated and republished several times throughout his life.
I was recently sent an annotated edition of this essay by Hippocampus Press, a small publisher that specializes in works related to Lovecraft and other classic horror and sci-fi writers. This annotated edition comes with an introduction by Lovecraft scholar S. T. Joshi, an extensive bibliography, and plenty of explanatory footnotes. Reading Lovecraft’s essay combined with this supplemental material was a truly informative experience.
In “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” Lovecraft seeks to provide a comprehensive overview of the horror genre from its very beginnings to the modern masters. After acknowledging horror’s roots in folklore, Lovecraft spends a section on the early Gothic novel, highlighting such authors as Horace Walpole, Clara Reeve, Ann Radcliffe, and Charles Brockden Brown. He follows that up with a discussion of Matthew Lewis’s The Monk and Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer as the “apex of Gothic Romance.” In a section titled “The Aftermath of the Gothic,” he covers authors that are today usually lumped in with the Gothic, including William Beckford, Mary Shelley, and Emily Brontë. From there, he devotes a section each to the continuation of literary tradition on the European continent, in the British Isles, and in America—though Edgar Allan Poe gets a whole section to himself. Lovecraft ends his essay with an in-depth discussion of his recent contemporaries, including Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, Lord Dunsany, and M. R. James.
Apart from being the most thorough survey of the genre’s history that I’ve ever read, “Supernatural Horror in Literature” is also a bit of a treatise on Lovecraft’s specific brand of horror, which he calls “weird tales.” This sub-type of horror was popular in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and is characterized by its supernatural elements, often blending horror with fantasy and science fiction. In this essay, Lovecraft lays out his definition of the genre:
The true weird tale has something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule. A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its subject, of that most terrible conception of the human brain—a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space.
Throughout the essay, Lovecraft evaluates the various works he discusses by how well they meet his criteria for the weird. He stresses a preference for seriousness of tone, sparing but powerful use of the supernatural, and an atmosphere of “cosmic horror,” while decrying humor, psuedo-scientific occultism, and “the mundanely gruesome.” Though these views somewhat bias his account of horror as a whole, they provide a fascinating insight into Lovecraft’s values as a writer and reader.
I found S. T. Joshi’s commentary in this annotated edition of the essay to be just as valuable as the essay itself, though he, too, has his own literary biases that color his analysis. (I rather disagree with his assessment that popular authors like Stephen King and Anne Rice will ultimately “be banished to the oblivion of superficial, if lucrative, hackdom,” for example.) In the introduction, Joshi contextualizes “Supernatural Horror in Literature” in terms of when and how the essay came to be written and also how it fits into Lovecraft’s larger body of work and overall philosophy on writing. But what I found most interesting were the footnotes in which Joshi corrects Lovecraft’s errors and points out which literary works Lovecraft hasn’t actually read for himself and where his assessments of those works came from. It’s good to know that I’m not the only one who has to occasionally fake my way through discussions of books I haven’t read!
While I certainly have my criticisms of Lovecraft both as a person and as a writer, his influence on the horror genre is undeniable and his survey of the genre is well-researched and insightful. I’d recommend this essay to both Lovecraft devotees and those merely interested in the genre as a whole, although you may want to take his personal assessments of individual authors and works with a grain of salt. You can buy the annotated edition discussed here from the Hippocampus Press website or by clicking this Bookshop.org affiliate link.