Oh, Horrors!

With dismay, I recall many years ago talking about author H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) with a colleague. She thought I was referring to a range of sex aids, until I put her straight about this strange and paranoid writer from New England.

But, though critic Edmund Wilson once dismissed Lovecraft as an overwriting “hack” responsible for spreading “bad taste and bad art,” this novelist of the macabre and artificial mythology seems to be slipping--ever so slowly--back into vogue. That became most obvious over this last weekend, when Britain’s BBC Radio 3 broadcast a special Sunday feature titled “Weird Tales: The Strange Life of H.P. Lovecraft.” The show featured commentary from writers Neil Gaiman, S.T. Joshi, Kelly Link, Peter Straub, and China Mieville. If you’d like to listen to that 45-minute program, you can do so until December 10 by clicking here. (After that, the segment should be available through the BBC archives.)

Many modern writers remain ambivalent about Lovecraft’s contribution to the mystery and horror genres. For instance, Stephen King (who wrote an introduction to Michel Houellebecq’s 2005 study of Lovecraft’s work) says that his precursor’s work is best read by teenagers and other people “living in a state of total sexual doubt.” One writer I know, a winner of the World Fantasy Award and recipient of a trophy shaped like a bust of Lovecraft, will insist, when asked, that the statuette actually portrays Jacques Cousteau. Perhaps most tellingly, even horror novelist Straub, brought in to write the notes for the Library of America collection of Lovecraft stories, confessed to Publishers Weekly that Lovecraft had “only a minimal influence” on him, and that during his 20s,“being very literary and self-conscious about it,” he had written Lovecraft off as inferior.

Yet whether Howard Philips Lovecraft was a bad writer, or a great one is in some ways beside the point. For readers of a certain inclination, his tales are fascinating and addictive. He has a sizable following, manifesting itself in everything from countless fan sites to role-playing games to praise from such notable admirers as critic (and Library of America editor-in-chief) Geoffrey O’Brien and novelist Joyce Carol Oates.

READ MORE: “Master of Disgust,” by Laura Miller (Salon).