In the Mountains of Madness: The Life and Extraordinary Afterlife of H.P. Lovecraft

257 Pages·2016·1.57 MB·English

by  W. Scott Poole

Copyright © 2016 by W. Scott Poole All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright
Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written
permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and
reviews.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available Cover design by Charles Brock, Faceout
Studio Interior design by Tabitha Lahr SOFT SKULL PRESS
An imprint of Counterpoint
2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318
Berkeley, CA 94710
www.softskull.com
Distributed by Publishers Group West 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
ebook ISBN 9781619028562
For Em
One need not be a Chamber—to be Haunted— One need not be a
House— The Brain has Corridors—surpassing Material Place
— Far safer, of a Midnight Meeting External Ghost
Than its interior Confronting— That Cooler Host.
Far safer, through an Abbey gallop, The Stones a’chase— Than
Unarmed, one’s a’self encounter— In lonesome Place—
—EMILY DICKINSON
“. . . the motor chewed up a whole roll of film as the flash angrily
slashes out at the prevailing darkness, ultimately capturing this dark
form, vanishing behind a closing door . . .”
—MARK Z. DANIELEWSKI, HOUSE OF LEAVES
CONTENTS
PART I: The Night Gaunts
PART II: Forbidden Books
PART III: Cthulhu Rises
A Brief Note About Sources
The Tales
NECRONOMICON: A Fakelore
PART I.
THE NIGHT GAUNTS
“I think I went mad then.”
Howard Phillips Lovecraft wrote these words at his window desk in the
quickly fading heat of the summer of 1917.
The smooth roll of fountain pen on paper mingled with provoking
street noise entering the window at 598 Angell Street in Providence,
Rhode Island. The slender twenty-six-yearold found these human sounds
excessively bothersome. A decline in family fortune forever separated him from
the quiet Victorian dignity that money could buy. He sometimes fantasized about
becoming deaf and retreating forever into his interior worlds, realms of darkly
intoxicating beauty and horror.
He owned a 1906 Remington typewriter but seldom used it. Nightfall
signaled the beginning of his writing workday. He convinced himself that the
sound of a typewriter would disturb his neighbors as much as it disturbed him.
He came to so dislike its industrial clatter that he sometimes declined to publish
his tales rather than prepare a typescript of them.
Many Lovecraft stories would never have appeared in any form if some of
his acolytes not taken the trouble to pound them out for him on their own
typewriters. This came to constitute a major theme in the Lovecraft
phenomenon. Adoring admirers taking an obsessional interest in his work kept
him from disappearing into pulp oblivion forever, a prospect he seemed in some
bizarre fashion to desire.
I do not think his current fame would have pleased him. He would have
hated the flood of books about him and their speculations or assertions about his
personal life. He would have hated the book you hold in your hands and what it
tells about the inner worlds of a gentleman from Providence who consistently
lied to the world about who and what he had been, performing more radical
revisions on his life story than he ever bothered to make in the fiction that has
made him famous.
But in 1917, he lived in almost complete obscurity, an obscurity he couldn’t
escape even when he tried. America had entered the First World War in April of
that year and, to the surprise of everyone that knew him, Lovecraft, who turned
twenty-seven that summer, volunteered for service. The army almost
immediately rejected him, largely because his mother, Sarah Susan Lovecraft,
made use of family connections to have him declared medically unfit.
Lovecraft described himself, at various times in his life, as having a weak
heart, neuralgic, a sufferer of night terrors, a para-insomniac, and, more
generally, the victim of a nervous disposition. None of his alleged ailments kept
him from what likely would have amounted to limited stateside military service.
In a letter to his fellow amateur journalist Reinhardt Kleiner, Lovecraft described
his mother as “prostrated with the news” that he had hoped to join the war effort.
He sheepishly admitted that she had “threatened to go to any lengths, legal or
otherwise, if I do not reveal all the ills which unfit me for the army.”1
Howard Lovecraft, who walked with an old man’s stoop but could also be seen
vigorously cycling the decaying graveyards and dark forest paths of New
England, accepted his failed attempt to join the army with his usual fatalism
about human existence, a bitterness against life tinged with a peculiar sense of
humor. Only those few who knew him best ever fully experienced his unlikely
combination of pomposity and capacity for self-parody. Lovecraft, perhaps more
than any important writer of the twentieth century, knew that the joke was on
him.
In the first twenty-seven years of his life, H.P. Lovecraft had seen his father
confined to a mental institution and subsequently die at an early age. At
fourteen, while on one of his long bicycle rides, the young Howard contemplated
drowning himself in the Barrington River. He dropped out of high school
because of a mysterious and unexplained nervous condition that turned him into
a virtual recluse between 1908 and 1913.
The boom in amateur journalism of the 1910s brought him out of what he
called “a vegetative state” and gave him limited but meaningful human contact
through a vast circle of correspondence that replicated certain aspects of
contemporary social media. In the years to come, he would marry the unlikeliest
woman in the world, move to New York City, get divorced (sort of), ghostwrite
for Harry Houdini, watch Tod Browning’s Dracula and not especially enjoy it
(or the city where he saw it) one tropical Miami night, and write stories for the