On the subject of Lovecraft, to which we keep returning:

My own take is that he was supremely talented at describing dread and disgust and horrifically deficient in describing anything else; his admitted and proud disinterest in people as subjects of fiction shows in his work and renders the whole remote and soulless. His racism, as visible in his fiction as it was in his letters, is not just a pollutant but the toxic fuel that drives it, that renders it an embarrassment today.

I have always maintained that Lovecraft wrote what amounted to florid role-playing manuals, a universe that other writers could run with if they wanted; and though few of those who followed him were able to sculpt the language in quite the way he did, many had other positive attributes that more compensated, among them the solid understanding that stories usually require characters. I find his cosmology interesting, but his stories impenetrable, his racism appalling and his overall lack of interest in human concerns repellent.

I understand the debt we owe him, as the creator of that role-playing manual. I do not respect him as a writer, and never have. I consider him a villain of sorts, and have indeed used a version of him as one, in my GUSTAV GLOOM novels. The bad guy there is a one-time pulp writer called Howard Philip October, and you better believe that some of his awfulness is me commenting on Lovecraft, down to the very last volume.

People who say that I need to put him in the perspective of his time, only get me to call their bluff. Okay, at approximately the same time this producer of pulp fiction was producing his ooga-booga scares, give or take a decade or so, the equally disreputable field of detective fiction was being blown up into a fine art by Dashiell Hammett and later, Raymond Chandler. While he was farting around with his thesaurus, mystery fiction was producing Cornell Woolrich and James M. Cain. In the disreputable field of science fiction, John W. Campbell was astonishing the readers with stories like “Twilight” and “Night” that were not escapist fantasies but attempts to address big question, and a couple of years later taking over ASTOUNDING and blowing up his field with his demand that his contributors meet the same literary standards as mainstream fiction, while providing SF thrills, a demand that shifted the field away from the BEM of the month, and giving flight to the careers of Heinlein, Asimov, Pohl and others; an innovation that in years to come helped pave the way for Bradbury, Vonnegut, Silverberg, Ellison, Le Guin, an absolute revolution coming along every decade or so; all while many of the purveyors of horror fiction continued to produce Lovecraft pastiches.

There’s always room for shit to be published, journeyman stuff to be published, just-plain-fun stuff to be published. And there are backlashes, as we have learned in recent years. But it is certainly instructive to note what happens to a field when it chooses people like Hammett and Chandler as formative icons, what happens to one when it chooses people like Heinlein and Asimov as formative icons, and what happens to one when it picks a Lovecraft as a formative icon. Mystery and science fiction had ghettos, but on the page they had mushrooming possibilities and crossover successes. Horror had decades of navel-gazing reiteration, that is still going on in some quarters even after other influences finally found their way in.

Lovecraft wasn’t a big fat zero. I’ll be the first to admit that he had something. But between what mysteries got from their icons, and what science fiction got from its icons, and what horror got from its icon, I think it’s clear that horror picked the most limiting, unhealthiest role model, and for generations paid the price.

Tags: Cornell Woolrich, Frederik Polhl, Gustav Gloom, H.P. Lovecraft, Harlan Ellison, Isaac Asimov, James M. Cain, John W. Campbell, Kurt Vonnegut, Mystery, Ray Bradbury, Raymond Chandler, Robert A. Heinlein, Robert Silverberg, Science Fiction, Ursula K. LeGuin | Category Books, Commentary, Horror, Life Wisdom, Science Fiction, Sneaky Metaphors, Writing