"Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn"

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not mean that we should voyage far.

H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu

My good friend Laurie and I have a sort of ongoing joke involving the jargons of our respective professions. In her case, as a professional fitness expert she can go on at length regarding anterior cruciate ligaments and so forth, and as a professional in the graphics industry I can counter with comments regarding CYMK versus RGB versus LAB.

However, I also have almost 40 years of background reading science fiction and fantasy, so every now and then I throw in a bit of esoterica from that part of my life. Today, when asked via e-mail if I would be going to the gym tomorrow, I replied as follows:

Yep, gym tomorrow failing some unknown catastrophe – sudden illness, power outages, Great C’thulhu rising from English Bay and reasserting his dominion over the pitiful slave race called humanity, that sort of thing.

Her next message had the somewhat startled subject line, "Great WHO?" And so, to H.P. Lovecraft and the Cthulhu Mythos.

Howard Phillip Lovecraft (1890-1937) is one of the truly groundbreaking authors in the area of horror. The majority of his work appeared in various pulp magazines such as Weird Tales in the 20's and 30's, and at the time of its publication he was almost completely unknown to the general public. However, in the 70 years since his death from intestinal cancer, his work has drawn a constant and loyal readership. Lovecraft creates the horror genre as we know it now: in the early 1900's it must have been considered almost insane to undertake a career as a writer of fantastic horror, but without Lovecraft, it's very likely that Stephen King wouldn't have an audience. In fact, King, along with writers such as Neil Gaiman, Robert Bloch and Clive Barker, cite Lovecraft's work as an influence on their own.

Lovecraft's early work is completely different from the stories that gained him his reputation. His first stories are pastiches of Lord Dunsany's fantasy tales - sadly, although Dunsany's lyrical and poetic style appears to be easily imitated, it is not as easy to match its quality. However, as Lovecraft continued to write, his work took a startling turn toward tales of inexplicable monstrosities and horrors.

Lovecraft is best know for the Cthulhu Mythos stories from this later period, wherein mankind is placed in a horrifying perspective. Mere insects or less when compared to the ancient godlike beings that created us, humanity is at best slaves or toys for the Old Ones , and at worst a source of food, like cattle. Characters in Lovecraft's stories are constantly stumbling into perils and dangers that sharply illustrate just how helpless we are when faced with these ancient terrors - how fatally helpless, in fact.

Lovecraft's archaic writing style can seem clichéd and trite to a modern reader, but it's important to remember that Lovecraft creates this style, which subsequent imitators are unable to master - much as Lovecraft was unable to match Dunsany's distinctive touch. But once you come to grips with his style, Lovecraft's stories come to life (so to speak.). You can feel the dripping liquescent corpse flesh as his characters stumble helplessly through the tunnels that burrow beneath - and into - the rotting coffins buried in ancient New England graveyards.

Cthulhu, the eponymous demon/god figure behind the Mythos, is described as lying either dead or asleep, or some awful combination of the two, in the sunken city of R'lyeh, somewhere beneath the Pacific Ocean. (The phrase "Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn" translates as "In his house at R'lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming".) In the story The Call of Cthulhu, an earthquake brings R'lyeh to the surface, where it is discovered by a passing ship, to the detriment of the crew. Cthulhu himself is described earlier in the story as he appears in the form of a statue:

It represented a monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopus-like head whose face was a mass of feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind. This thing, which seemed instinct with a fearsome and unnatural malignancy, was of a somewhat bloated corpulence...

However, the monstrous reality of Cthulhu is indescribable - "there is no language for such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy, such eldritch contradictions of all matter, force and cosmic order. A mountain walked or stumbled."

Surprisingly, in spite of Cthulhu's eldritch, squamous, dripping indescribability, he has an odd cultural presence in the modern world - what bizarre sequence of events leads to someone deciding that they should market a plush, stuffed-toy version of an Elder God? (Or run it for President, for that matter.) However, the Plush Cthulhu is symbolic of the position that Lovecraft and the Mythos have in popular culture. Lovecraft references are everywhere, as a quick Google search reveals. Stories, movies, television, art, t-shirts, bumper stickers, comics, toys, games - how odd that the creations of an obscure author of horror fiction, who considered himself "an insignificant amateur", would secure such a foothold.

In conclusion, I feel that I should point out that this posting is a very brief summary of H.P. Lovecraft and his work. Scholarship has run rampant with Lovecraft, and anyone interested in the man, his life and his work could easily assemble a small library in the process of reading all the biographies and literary analyses available, not to mention the stories themselves. (As an interesting example, Lovecraft maintained an ongoing correspondence-based friendship with author Robert E. Howard, whose stories about Conan the Barbarian represent one of the only other bodies of work from the pulps that remains known to the general public.)

In terms of recommendations, The Call of Cthulhu is a good representative sample of Lovecraft's work, and it's available in a variety of collections. For me, though, the best Lovecraft story is Pickman's Model, which deals with a painter whose interest turns to paintings of horrific, ghoulish, nauseating, "nameless blasphemies". The final sentence of the story is a brilliant punch line, and although it's tempting to quote it here, using it would be as complete a spoiler as, "Luke, I am your father" from The Empire Strikes Back. Suffice it to say that if you read only one Lovecraft story, it should be Pickman's Model, in my mind the perfect introduction to the bizarre fiction of H.P. Lovecraft.

-Sid