If you are a 'serious horror reader', you will know this one. Someone asks you what you watch or read or write, and instead of saying something wise like 'Japanese technical manuals', you blurt out the 'H' word to be rewarded with a blank stare and a moment's pause before the response comes. “Oh, you mean like Stephen King?”
The key to survival under these circumstances, is to fall back on the smug sense of knowing that you are familiar with H.P. Lovecraft *. No disrespect is intended to Stephen King, an excellent writer who provides hours of good reading with every book, but people who are serious about the horror genre know that there is more to it than Stephen King, and will in all likelihood trace the source of their pride back to Lovecraft.
Lovecraft is at the center of modern horror, and it is easy to adulate him, even wish to be him in spite of his death at a relatively early age. Unfortunately it is not entirely right to see him as an originator.
The problem with Lovecraft is that he doesn't make easy reading. His prose is dense in an intelligent way. The words are so tightly packed that from time to time the reader will need to pick through the same page two or three times to scratch out the details, and even then, the details may not be immediately apparent. I am still trying to figure out what is an evil angle?
Due to the difficulty, the one thing that only a handful of readers get to is his seminal (if relatively unread) essay 'Supernatural Horror in Literature', and this is even more densely packed with words than his stories. It is easy to feel deprived by an inability to get around to reading it, but difficult to penetrate past a few pages.
Fortunately, perennial favourite anthologist Stephen Jones comes to our rescue not once, but twice, with two collections containing the stories noted in the essay.
The World's Greatest Horror Stories
H. P. Lovecraft's Book of the Supernatural
'H.P. Lovecraft's Book of the Supernatural' contains well-known stories. 'The World's Greatest Horror Stories is more revealing, and two stories stand out particularly.
In 'Fish Head' by Irvin S. Cobb, the protagonist is chased by a person who resembles in may ways a fish, a hybrid much like the denizens of Innsmouth. In 'The Hog', one of William Hope Hodgson's Carnacki stories, the eldritch god in outer space takes on the appearance of a hog.
What the stories point to is that Lovecraft was influenced. If not the creator of the ideas, then he must be recognised as a prism in which ideas and tropes crystallized, were refined and then communicated onwards.
By providing these ideas and the back stories to other writers, in addition to his own stories, Lovecraft became the icon that he is today
There is something to be said for the approach of making new or refined tropes with their back stories available to other writers, but there must also be a word of caution. Lovecraft's tropes were limited to a smaller group of writers. In the age of the ebook, opening too wide may damage the effect of the trope at the outset.
* The ability to reply with the words 'Cthulhu Fhtagn' while wriggling outstretched fingers of one hand and giving the questioner a soul-piercing stare
may also help, but is not recommended.
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