Published in Thomas Honegger and Dirk Vanderbeke (eds.). 2014. From Peterborough To Faëry: The Poetics and Mechanics of Secondary Worlds. Cormarë Series 31. Zurich and Jena: Walking Tree Publishers, 113-140.

Paper presented at SLSA 2017

2010

This essay will explore the works of the famed horror writer Howard Philips Lovecraft, from the angle of the Enlightenment and its influence on Lovecraft, most notably the philosophy of the materialism and the religious theories that conflicted with it. The focus will be on a collection of his stories known as the Cthulhu mythos, three stories in particular: "The Call of Cthulhu", "The Color out of Space" and one of his longest stories At the Mountains of Madness. Chapter one will explore the concepts of the Enlightenment in relation to Lovecraft, in order to understand the basis of his ideological formation. The second Chapter will focus on the concepts of the enlightenment that Lovecraft opposed; the place of humanity in the nature, in particular and religion. Furthermore it will start to explore the basics of Lovecraft's Cosmicism and the iconic spiritualists such as the theosophist which Lovecraft so often mentions in his stories with strong tones of irony. The third chapter will explain the core of it all, the Cosmicism of Lovecraft, which is the framework around the so called Cthulhu mythos. Possible reasons as to its creation will also be explored, such as the aforementioned opposition versus the spiritualists in the second chapter. The fourth chapter will study the sublime at work in Lovecraft, his relation to Edmund Burke and how it helped with his formation of horror, a necessary thing in order to understand the nature of his literary universe. The fifth chapter is split up into three separate case studies where each of the stories mentioned above are explored to the core, in order to coin it all together. Most of the research was done through the internet, through the mediums of journal libraries such as Proquest and Ebscohost, some collected manuscripts were used such as Burke's manuscript A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful and of course the greatest focus was on Lovecraft's own stories.

In Dennis P. Quinn & Elena Tchougounova-Paulson (eds.), Lovecraftian Proceedings No. 4, 126-148. New York: Hippocampus Press, 2022

Studies in Gothic Fiction, 2021

In 1974 Angela Carter declared “we live in gothic times” (133). It is perhaps more apposite these days to suggest that we live in weird times. This is not to say that the Weird (as a literary mode) has superseded the Gothic; rather that it comprises a polymorphous outgrowing emanating from and intertwining with it. What does it mean to say we live in weird times? Perhaps it is a pervasive sense of unreality, or a reality that has been fractured. Certainly, the ecological moment is one of ontological shock as widespread extinction and the effects of climate change prompt pleas across the globe for governments to declare an emergency. Meanwhile, the stranger monsters and specters of the gothic mode, in particular the uncanny appendage of the tentacle, have proliferated across cultural media, especially in the West. In his essay on Supernatural Horror in Literature (1927), writer of weird tales, H. P. Lovecraft suggests that “[t]he appeal of the spectrally macabre is generally narrow because it demands from the reader a certain degree of imagination and a capacity for detachment from every-day life” (n.p.). Contrary to Lovecraft, we are surrounded by weird intrusions every day. These are not only to be found in playful and referential cephalopodic literary fiction, including Kraken (2010) by China Miéville, but in a wider range of fictions drawing on multiple cultural narratives, such as Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti series (2015-2018). In popular culture, the weird manifests in unlikely places. In the opening credits of the recent James Bond film, Spectre (2015), for example, the tentacular becomes emblematic for the unseen machinations of conglomerate control. The attraction of the Weird seems then to be anything but “narrow,” and Lovecraft’s creations in particular have proved to be highly adaptable. The monstrous creation, Cthulhu, pervades the high street emblazoned on t-shirts, mugs, mouse-mats, and any other malleable object that can sustain its image. This very reflexivity of the Lovecraftian permeates a host of media, as the articles in this issue demonstrate, from film and television to video and roleplaying games, comics, and graphic novels. The weird emerges at the fringes but also in the mainstream; it is mobilized by top-down media power for profit as well as grassroots, indie productions. In the podcast Welcome to Night Vale (2012-current), the dulcet tones of Cecil Baldwin reassures listeners that the great cosmic void awaits us all. It is this very popularity of the Weird, which attracts a self-conscious referentiality, to which this special issue is dedicated. The knowing deployment of a Lovecraftian aesthetic is a form of adaptation, which Julie Sanders defines as the “reinterpretation of established (canonical or perhaps just well-known) texts in new generic contexts or perhaps with relocations of an ‘original’ or source text’s cultural and/or temporal setting, which may or may not involve a generic shift” (Adaptation and Appropriation 27). This issue interrogates a variety of Lovecraftian and Weird adaptations. What do these remediations offer beyond pastiche or homage? Why has the Lovecraftian become such a “popular” contemporary medium and what does it portend for not only cultural and literary studies but wider ontological framings? In Postmillenial Gothic: Comedy, Romance and the Rise of Happy Gothic (2017), Catherine Spooner suggests that the Gothic comes to permeate a person’s life and influences not only their media consumption, but their aesthetic outlook, the clothes they wear, and the values they hold. Certainly, the Weird, and particularly the Lovecraftian, seems to have followed a similar trend in its spread beyond the cult roots of the initial magazine run of Weird Tales (1922-1940) into mainstream appeal. As Xavier Aldana Reyes points out, Lovecraft owes much to his Gothic predecessors, and his oeuvre represents a sustained engagement with the Gothic as he adapted elements from Edgar Allan Poe, Ann Radcliffe, and Matthew Lewis to name a few (ix). Lovecraft did not deny the connection, despite his dismissal of “bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule” (n.p.). If the Weird develops from the Gothic perhaps it does so much like the nameless color central to “The Colour out of Space” (1927), which gestates and ruptures in an inexplicable and indescribable conjuring of a “real” that cannot quite be encapsulated. For the Weird and Lovecraftian is interested in all that is strange, eerie, and unusual, pushing anthropocentrism to its limits and scrutinizing perceived definitions of “reality.” As Benjamin Robertson suggests in None of this is Normal: The Fiction of Jeff VanderMeer (2018)—which is reviewed later in this issue—the Weird confronts the very notion of any conceivable “norm” until it is rather the subject’s perception that is brought into question. Such a framework seems uniquely positioned to engage with the ontological terror of our current ecological moment then, where the cracks are beginning to show in the corrosive “reality” that humanity took for granted. As Gerry Canavan and Andrew Hageman suggest, in a borrowing from Thomas Friedman’s “global weirding,” our climate has perceptively gotten “weird” (7). They argue that such terminology offers a “cognitive frame . . . to refocus our attention on the localities within the totality of the global,” to critically deploy the Weird as a frame to engage with contemporary eco-anxieties or the non-real in which “readers discover they’re entering zones of radical uncertainty: can this be real?” (8, 10, original emphasis). The Weird offers no solution to such uncertainty, but it does offer a means of engagement with it.

2017

In the early part of the twentieth century, the Modernist literary movement moving into what was arguably its peak, and authors we would now unquestioningly consider part of the Western literary canon were creating some of their greatest works. Coinciding with the more mainstream Modernist movement, there emerged a unique subgenre of fiction on the pages of magazines with titles like Weird Tales and Astounding Stories. While modernist writers; including Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, William Faulkner, and T.S. Elliot – among others – were achieving acclaim for their works; in the small corner of unique weird fiction there was one eccentric, bookish writer who rose above his own peers: Howard Phillips Lovecraft. I would argue that within the works of Lovecraft there are glimpses of modernism. Lovecraft was aware of and wrote with an understanding of the concerns of the more mainstream literature of the Modernists, and he situa...

Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, 2007

Kantian notions of sublimity abound in his fiction: phenomena whose principal characteristics are their formlessness, infinite expanse, or superhuman might; a subject's encounter with the negative or, put another way, symbolic presentation of what would be described in the fiction of a humanist as its noumenal self; and the limits of language 1 to represent adequately both the awe-inspiring spectacle and the subject's experience of the violation of the limits of being. Lovecraft's pronouncements on "cosmic horror," the effect he aimed to convey in his stories, seem to encourage a sublime reading of his work. Cosmic horror-that fear and awe we feel when confronted by phenomena beyond our comprehension, whose scope extends beyond the narrow field of human affairs and boasts of cosmic significance-compels the expansion of the experiencing subject's imagination. Two recent studies, moreover, elaborate on the relevance of the Burkean and Kantian sublimes, respectively, in Lovecraft's myth cycle. In "Lovecraft and the Burkean Sublime" (1991), Dale J. Nelson defends the idea that cosmic horror is coeval with religious feeling in Burke. In "Lovecraft and the Semiotic Kantian Sublime" (2002), Bradley A. Will argues that the force of cosmic horror is based upon Lovecraft's presentation of the unknowable rather than merely the unknown in his fiction.

A short paper identifying a major trend in Lovecraft's work, as in addition to the Cthulhu and Dream Cycles.

A brief overview of the relationship between Lovecraft and modern occultism.

2022

(1890-1937) have often been compared, the differences are nonetheless striking. Whereas Poe exploits the recesses of the human soul, including obsessions and deliriums, Lovecraft suggests a real existence of worlds existing next to ours. Many phantasy authors have evoked another world, either paradisiac or infernal, but Lovecraft emphasizes the intrinsic connection between those worlds and ours. Vague memories of civilizations long gone by, of forgotten languages and horrid life forms, still haunt humankind, at least its more sensitive members. Lovecraft uses several ways to forge that connection. Not all ways will be agreeable to our modern mind and some may even be as repulsive as the alien creatures he evokes. Biographical data can clarify his tendency to resort to racial theories. However, let us first make an inventory of the devices Lovecraft exploits to underline the genuine existence of his alien creatures, differing as they do from the products of a psychological deep drilling, although the element of fear is undoubtedly common to both. First Lovecraft stresses the force of hereditary characteristics. Although our rational faculty would make us believe that we are masters of our own destiny, the call of blood and race reduces human beings to a toy of fate. Then there are these stories of the past, relating the life of gods, heroes and monsters, nowadays mainly acknowledged as pre-scientific, mythological attempts to account for fearful events, such as earthquakes, storm, fire and diseases. Hence, these mythologies from a remote past have lost their ontological status for modern human beings. There are exceptions: in Germany of the beginning of the 20 th century, a theory has been developed tributary to Romanticism, in which the gods of bygone mythology were supposed to have a genuine existence, as long as there are people who believe in them. A poet like Hölderlin addresses the heroes and gods of Greek mythology as his contemporaries, alive and vibrant. Lovecraft traces these gods to alien creatures, still alive and with access to our world, which can be proven by devoted scholarly research, performed by idiosyncratic and somewhat otherworldly professors. Archaeology, philological studies of ancient languages as well as inscriptions in long abandoned caves may reveal strange mythologies as a living reality, claiming its toll from modern society. A third element may surprise the reader, except those readers who will remember Mary Shelley's Monster of Frankenstein.1 Lovecraft does not place modern science and the forgotten world of alien creatures squarely opposite each other, but claims that modern science itself may reveal that other world. Scientists who have not yet discovered that faculty are so to say somewhat superficial and prejudiced by unproven dogmas, whereas the sensitive scientist will discover those horrid worlds by exploiting his theories to the full. 1 Note how the young scientist Frankenstein, persuaded by the power of science, creates his monster. 8 Lovecraft was well aware of the dozens Gothic and horror novels preceding him in Britain. He wrote a solid overview of this literature: Supernatural horror in literature.

2013

Amen 9.4 The Justice League face Starro the Conqueror 9.5 Claustrophobia and psychological breakdown 9.6 Alberto Breccia's Cthulhu, from Los mitos de Cthulhu 9.7 The eerie mood of Lovecraft's stories is captured 9.8 For whom the bell bongs? 9.9 A telepathic attack from beyond the stars? 9.10 Shattered perspectives and contact with the unrepresentable 9.11 Hellboy by Mike Mignola 9.12 Cthulhu Tales and The Strange Adventures of H. P. Lovecraft 9.13 At the Mountains of Madness by Ian Culbard 9.14 "The Call of Cthulhu" by Ian Edginton and D'Israeli 9.15 Neonomicon by Alan Moore and Jacen Burrows This page intentionally left blank Works Cited

AI

2018

The horror of Howard Philips Lovecraft’s writing lies within the mentality and psychology of his characters. Since he first became prominent, the main criticism against Howard Philips Lovecraft has been that his writing uses too many adjectives, and that his creatures and monsters are vague. This essay aims to contribute to the ongoing discussion of Lovecraft’s horror whilst countering the valid criticisms against his writing. By focusing on Lovecraft’s use of first-person narration and applying the theory of Weird Realism and the idea of the sublime, this essay details the reason of psychological horror in Lovecraft’s narratives. The focus of the argument is that the horror of Lovecraft is not in the creatures and monsters, but in the mental reactions of his characters and in the traumatized aftermath of the characters that survive in the three tales, Dagon, At the Mountains of Madness, and The Call of Cthulhu.

Gothic Studies, 2018

This new volume is a welcome addition to the ever-growing scholarship on gothic, horror, and fantasy film and literature, much of it coming from UK and Canadian scholars, many of whom are featured in this book. In Clive Barker: Dark Imaginer, editor Sorcha Ní Fhlainn introduces twelve new essays examining Great Britain's most well-known and prolific horror/ dark fantasy writer and filmmaker. As she notes in her excellent introduction to the bookfollowing a concise yet thorough overview of Barker's varied career-Barker's oeuvre has not received the scholarly attention it assuredly deserves. 'To date, this new collection is the only book that completely dedicates itself to the scholarly analysis of Barker's works since [Gary] Hoppenstand's analysis of the Books of Blood' (16), Barker's collections of short horror stories which first brought him to international acclaim. Ní Fhlainn suggests this may be partly due to Barker's formal and creative promiscuity, his 'desire to focus his works through different media while oscillating between the genres of horror and the fantastique, and publishing for both adult and young adult audiences' (15). Indeed, many critics and fans first who discovered Barker within the realm of 1980s 'body horror'-as exemplified by the Books of Blood (1984-85) and the Hellraiser film franchise (1987-)-were perhaps generically confused when Barker's work moved into the realm of what he himself has termed the 'dark fantastique', the complex fantasy dream worlds depicted in novels like Weaveworld (1987), Imajica (1991), and Coldheart Canyon (2001). And what mere film or literary critic could hope to keep up with Barker's tremendously varied output? Not only is he a writer and filmmaker, he also sketches, paints, and sculpts; he has designed models/toys, theme park attractions, and video games; and he was even a pioneer of 1970s avant-garde theatre (wherein his professional career in the macabre arguably began). To its credit, this new volume engages with much of that varied output, even as it realizes the impossibility of comprehensive analysis. It is, instead, 'an invitation, a Barkerian doorway, a path towards understanding Barker's own place within popular fiction and popular culture, examining the power, the contradictions, and occasional limitations of his own unique brand' (20). Ní Fhlainn's volume is divided into four parts. In the first, 'Origins', Darryl Jones and Kevin Corstorphine explore contemporary and historical influences on the Books of Blood. Jones analyzes the Books alongside and within the publishing trends and cultural politics of Margaret Thatcher's Britain. Corstorphine uses William Blake's painting The Ghost of a Flea (1819-20) as a jumping off point for a discussion of the Books' indebtedness to visual and literary traditions, including the Grand Guignol and Antonin Artaud's 'theatre of cruelty', as well as H. P. Lovecraft's and China Mieville's reconfigurations of the 'weird tale'. The final essay in this section returns to the contexts of 1980s Britain as they are figured within Weaveworld; in it, author Edward Timothy Wallington expertly outlines how the novel 'transcends the immediate limitations of its genre to provide a thought-provoking and evocative reflection on the times in which it was written' (56). Part Two, 'Screening Barker', contains three essays on Barker's works as they were adapted into visual media. Harvey's O'Brien's chapter examines the last film Barker directed-Lord of Illusions (1996)-finding it a 'joyless' reflection of the mistreatment Barker himself underwent when his auteur project Nightbreed (1990) was mangled by its Hollywood producers. As O'Brien puts it, 'Lord of Illusions is marked by self-deflating irony and skepticism amounting almost to a self-loathing that made it an apt cinematic swansong; a farewell to a medium that seemed to have brought Barker nothing but trouble.' (71) (Such self-reflexive and autobiographical

In this somewhat informal paper, I begin with a discussion of philosophical tropes and the notion of literary criticism as literature, before engaging in a close reading of Lovecraft's "transference of consciousness" tales, and how these stories demand a co-operative, "demiurgic" approach to maximize not only the reader's enjoyment but also to challenge him or her to look beyond the often nihilistic themes in Lovecraft's tales, in order to see his almost Romantic style of escapist art for art's sake.

Pulse, 2020

This collection of thirteen chapters takes as its starting point H. P. Lovecraft's essay of 1927, "Supernatural Horror in Literature" (SHL), in which the author most axiomatically sets out his paradigms of "cosmic horror" and "weird fiction," models with a vast (if selective) historical antecedence and a tentacular reach into the present of the horror genre, and its likely future. Divided into three sections, the volume focuses primarily on Lovecraft's own reading practices and his ungainsayable, yet controversial, influence on contemporary understandings of the weird. As John Glover puts it in his contribution to the collection, SHL "encapsulates the views that Lovecraft held which dictated the terms of weird fiction's reception for more than half a century." 2 As anyone even cursorily acquainted with Lovecraft's work will know, a great many of said views amount to a complex of hatreds whose breadth is remarkable, comprising just about every imaginable kind of racism as well as homophobia and misogyny, and whose putative 1 Niall Gildea is a researcher based in the UK. He is the author of Jacques Derrida's Cambridge Affair: Deconstruction, Philosophy and Institutionality, published by Rowman & Littlefield in 2020. 2 John Glover, "Reception Claims in Supernatural Horror in Literature and the Course of Weird Fiction," in Sean Moreland, ed.

A bibliographic essay that surveys the scholarship and reception of H. P. Lovecraft’s work from 1990 to 2004.

2010

Wordsworth Editions Blog, 2022

A blasted heath where nothing grows yet dead trees seem strangely animated; an abandoned well that glows with a colour that has no name; a disastrous expedition to Antarctica written by a survivor only to warn others to stay away; cathedral-sized buildings from before the dawn of mankind where the geometry doesn’t make sense; a pulp writer found dead at his desk, a look of frozen horror on his face; sailors discover a drowned city and half a world away an artist begins to sculpt a hideous figure while an architect goes mad; something not quite human breaks into an academic library to steal an unholy book; human brains are removed and placed in cannisters for transport to other worlds; the dead scream and a doctor vanishes; alien gods, ancient and terrible, dream beneath the sea… Enter, if you dare, the weird world of H.P. Lovecraft. If you know Lovecraft’s fiction, there’s nothing you need from me. In fact, you almost certainly know it better than I do. Devotees of Lovecraft tend to be as encyclopaedic as he was, and several academics have forged successful careers out of interpreting his work, life, and letters. His ‘Cthulhu Mythos’ is pored over like a religious text, with references to it in Aleister Crowley’s Book of the Law and The Satanic Rituals by Anton LaVey and Michael A. Aquino. There are at least half a dozen books in print claiming to be the real Necronomicon of the ‘Mad Arab’ alchemist and necromancer Abdul Alhazred – another of Lovecraft’s inventions. Lovecraft’s influence over 20th century horror, supernatural and science fiction is vast, with symbols from his work spread out across popular culture, from death metal and Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen to Scooby Doo and Gravity Falls. There are currently over 30 films based on his stories, most notably the cult Re-Animator series directed by Stuart Gordon and Brian Yuzna (who also adapted Lovecraft’s 1920 story ‘From Beyond’), and many more that take their inspiration from him, such as Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead saga. In gothic literature, Lovecraft is the equal of Poe, to whom, he wrote, ‘we owe the modern horror-story in its final and perfected state’; he has no other peer. And their collective influence can be felt in the crimson line of great American horror writing that runs from Robert Bloch (who was a friend of Lovecraft’s), through Richard Matheson, to Stephen King. In the Geek Kingdom, if you want to suss out a so-called ‘horror expert’, check out what they have to say about H.P. Lovecraft...

Lovecraftian Proceedings 3: Selected papers from the Dr. Henry Armitage Memorial Scholarship Symposium, NecronomiCon Providence 2017: New York: Hippocampus Press, pp. 35—51., 2019

I propose to analyse the vivid resemblance between the literary works of the Russian poet-Symbolist Alexander Blok and HP Lovecraft from the perspective of their mythopoetics. Such an approach is entirely original; although scholars have studied both authors extensively, none has attempted a comparative assessment of their aesthetic worldviews. I want to address not only the writings of Blok and Lovecraft themselves, but also their extra-textual substantiality, including the evolution of Blok’s and Lovecraft’s Weltanschauung as incarnated in their heritage. My analysis proceeds in two stages. First, I classify the most significant publications on which a comparative study can be based and second, I establish the actual conception on the structural and typological levels, using primarily comparative and intertextual methods as theoretical frameworks. Why, exactly, these two writers? Because there is a striking similarity in the depth of their world perception and in their philosophical development. Chronologically, both authors lived in the same era (the tipping point of modern history with the First World War, the Russian revolution, etc.), which can substantially explain their crucial (i.e. eschatological) feeling of the end of time. Given the extensiveness of this topic, I offer here only an introductory commentary. The works dedicated to Blok and Lovecraft (individually) are voluminous. Of the two, only Blok has received significant attention in both Russian and Western literary studies, largely as the key figure in the literature of the Russian fin de siècle (or Silver Age). Lovecraft’s work has remained primarily the domain of Western scholars, who have addressed his influence on modern American literature, fine art and cinema. Existing work in Russian is preoccupied with the artistic methods used in his fiction, the structure of The Cthulhu Mythos, and Lovecraft’s substantial role in American neo-Gothic culture. Comparing the poetics of the supernatural in Blok and Lovecraft’s works demands an examination of their entire oeuvre, including poetry, fiction, articles, and correspondence.

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