I am by no means a connoisseur of H. P. Lovecraft. I've read maybe a dozen of his stories. I don't particularly care for Lovecraft's ponderous writing style either. There is also the inescapable problem of his xenophobia. All that said, however, there is something interesting and worth reading in Lovecraft's stories. To be overly brief, he posits a universe of immeasurable vastness in both time and space and populates this universe with beings for whom humanity is below notice. The terror in Lovecraft is that humankind is irrelevant. Almost all his characters are assuaging that terror in some way; they embrace madness or deny the truth they have glimpsed or seek relevance by allying with the more powerful beings. These human responses to fear are what make Lovecraft's stories interesting to me because humans still struggle, over 100 years after Lovecraft began writing, to make meaning for themselves in a universe we know to be even larger and even more impersonal than he described.
Lin Carter was a fantasy and science fiction writer who also worked as an editor in those genres. He also wrote three non-fiction studies of fantasy fiction and its origins. This is the second in the series. They aren't exactly scholarly studies, but Carter was clearly very well-read and he knew what he was talking about. He also has the distinction to be among the first to examine the fantasy genre as it was first emerging so his comments form an interesting time capsule of sorts. The first “A Look Behind” book took on Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings in 1969 just after the publication of the first paperback edition had made Tolkien a household name. Though I like Lovecraft less than Tolkien this follow-up book by Carter from 1972 was a much better read. Carter knew many of the people involved in the story of Lovecraft's failure to flourish in his own time and in his long, slow rise to posthumous popularity. Carter essentially says because of his professional and personal relationships he was in a unique position to actually take a look behind the origins of the “Cthuhlu Mythos.” Those connections show through in the book. Carter himself met Lord Dunsany, who had been one of Lovecraft's major early influences. He exchanged letters with Lovecraft's ex-wife to get her insight. Carter even had his own Mythos stories published by August Derleth, Lovecraft's main literary successor. These sorts of near-overlaps with Lovecraft give Carter a certainly unique and seemingly well-informed perspective. Carter writes with clarity and authority and the book is very readable.
Carter follows both Lovecraft's biography and his career. I found all of this information interesting because I knew so little of it already. Yet, Lovecraft: A Look Behind this is not really a biography nor is it a deep investigation into the themes of Lovecraft's oeuvre. Carter focuses on the fifteen stories he identifies as connected to each other in the “shared universe” of the Cthuhlu Mythos. He gives dates of composition and tells where and how each story came to be published. Carter sometimes relates anecdotes connected to the tales taken from Lovecraft's enormous correspondence or related directly to Carter by people who knew Lovecraft. This is the main point of the book. It traces how one chance mention on one early story was built upon again and again in later stories to create the cosmos-spanning Mythos. The only real weakness of the book is the tendency of some of these sections to read as simplistic lists following the format: “Then Lovecraft wrote X story, which introduced Y tome of lore and Z elder god.”
In large part the tale of Lovecraft's work is a tale of two publishers. First, the pulp magazine Weird Tales, which seemed to be the first and only magazine Lovecraft considered submitting his work to. A rejection from Weird Tales (often for length or for the simple fact he usually submitted single-spaced, hand-written pages!) usually meant a finished story remains unpublished until after Lovecraft's death. Lovecraft accepted Weird Tales' tiny paychecks and never looked for work elsewhere even as other magazines with wider circulations and better pay rates entered the market. Lovecraft's inability or unwillingness to turn his ideas to profit led to a life of poverty which in turn contributed to his early death from ill health. This also means many of Lovecraft's stories are no longer under copyright because Weird Tales eventually folded and the rights passed to the public domain. After Lovecraft died one of the many literary friends Lovecraft had cultivated from the Weird Tales circle committed to putting Lovecraft's work into hardcover form. This was August Derleth and he launched Arkham House, named for one of Lovecraft's fictional towns. Derleth became a successful publisher as well as an accomplished writer and his goal of collecting all Lovecraft's stories and keeping them all in print was accomplished. Lovecraft's stories have always been both held up as worth reading and easy to access so they continue to be a source of inspiration.
Something I didn't expect is that Lovecraft's large circle of fellow writers considered creating the Mythos as something of a game. The vast number of old books containing forbidden knowledge strains creditably from a certain point of view. How can so many rare and dangerous books be in so many collections without becoming just another part of the standard body of human knowledge? But that logistical complaint comes from the modern era looking back. For the original members of the Lovecraft circle, inventing a new half-mad scholar with yet another collection of arcane formulas referencing some formerly unknown semi-deity was like telling a good joke. They competed with each other, turning each other's names and hometowns into data points in the shadowy background of the shared fictional world they all created. The Mythos was always open-ended. New people were always able to add to it and so many have over the last century. Unfortunately, many people don't seem to have realized the joke part of the whole operation. Robert Bloch told Carter when Lovecraft died he didn't have the heart to tell any more of the jokes because the person they were for wouldn't be able to enjoy them. Somehow it warms my heart to know the man who has become nearly synonymous with dark and horrible and wrote about earth-shaking and mind-shattering beings from the stars was really just having a laugh with his friends.
I did not really learn anything more about the Cthulhu Mythos than I already knew from the dozen or so Lovecraft stories I've read and from what I've picked up via cultural osmosis. However, I did learn quite a bit about Lovecraft and the constellation of writers surrounding him. I've added a bunch of names to my reading list. There's a lot of works about Lovecraft out there these days, but this still serves as a great introduction. I think after Lovecraft: A Look Behind am ready for one of the more substantial Lovecraft biographies out there.
Here is Carter's list of Lovecraft's “Cthulhu Mythos” stories with links to them all on Wikisource. Go read all them yourself, if you haven't already.
1. "The Nameless City" (1938)
2. ”The Hound” (1924)
3. "The Festival" (1925)
4. "The Call of Cthulhu" (1928)
5. "The Dunwich Horror" (1929)
6. "The Whisperer in Darkness" (1931)
7. The Shadow Over Innsmouth (1936)
8. "At the Mountains of Madness" (1936)
9. "The Dreams in the Witch House" (1933)
10. "The Thing on the Doorstep" (1937)
11. "The Shadow out of Time" (1936)
12. "The Haunter of the Dark" (1936)
13. History and Chronology of the 'Necronomicon' (1936)
14. Fungi from Yuggoth (1941)
15. “The Challenge from Beyond” (1935) – written with A. Merrit, C. L. Moore, Robert E. Howard and Frank Belknap Long.
