Read Waking Up Screaming Online
Authors: H.P. Lovecraft
Waking Up Screaming
“Lovecraft's fiction is one of the cornerstones of modern horror.”
—C
LIVE
B
ARKER
“H. P. Lovecraft has yet to be surpassed as the twentieth century's greatest practitioner of the classic horror tale.”
—S
TEPHEN
K
ING
“Lovecraft's influenced people as diverse as Stephen King and Colin Wilson, Umberto Eco and John Carpenter. He's all over the cultural landscape…. Lovecraft is a resonating wave. He's rock and roll.”
—N
EIL
G
AIMAN
“A master craftsman, Lovecraft brings compelling visions of nightmarish fear, invisible worlds, and the demons of the unconscious. If one author truly represents the very best in American literary horror, it is H. P. Lovecraft.”
—J
OHN
C
ARPENTER
“Reading Lovecraft is more than experiencing the creations of a bizarre and fitful mind through the medium of exquisite prose. It's far more chilling than that…. What you read is what he lived, and that's the scariest thing of all.”
—W
ALTER
K
OENIG
The H. P. Lovecraft editions from Del Rey Books
The Best of H. P. Lovecraft:
BLOODCURDLING TALES OF HORROR AND THE MACABRE
The Dream Cycle of H. P. Lovecraft: DREAMS OF TERROR AND DEATH
The Transition of H. P. Lovecraft: THE ROAD TO MADNESS
Other stories in the Lovecraftian World
H. P. Lovecraft and Others:
TALES OF THE CTHULHU MYTHOS
Stories Inspired by H. P. Lovecraft:
CTHULHU 2000
And also available:
WAKING UP SCREAMING
AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS
And Other Tales of Terror
THE TOMB
And Other Tales
SHADOWS OF DEATH
THE HORROR IN THE MUSEUM
Books published by The Random House Publishing Group
are available at quantity discounts on bulk purchases for
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use. For details, please call 1-800-733-3000.
“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear,
and the oldest and strongest kind of fear
is fear of the unknown.”
—H. P. L
OVECRAFT
Being Providence: An Introduction to H. P. Lovecraft by Poppy Z. Brite
1.
Cool Air
12.
The Moon-Bog
13.
The Temple
14.
Dagon
15.
From Beyond
An Introduction to H. P. Lovecraft
O
NCE OR TWICE
in every century we readers of weird fiction are blessed with a writer who changes the very course of the genre. In our time, certainly no one has done it since Stephen King. Before King, the last writer to do it was arguably H. P. Lovecraft. At the time of his death in 1937, his work had not been collected and was not even widely read. Today, thanks to the efforts of his friends August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, his influence extends over all of horror fiction. Even those sad writers who “don't have time to read” but count film as their primary inspiration—and there are far too many of them— cannot escape the bony hand of Lovecraft, evident in the work of weird filmmakers from John Carpenter and David Cronenberg to Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez.
Why, though? What allows a particular author to reach out and grab the zeitgeist? Though King and Lovecraft are two of my favorite writers, I don't think it is simply talent that makes them so quintessential to the genre. Rather, I believe that some quality in their work mirrors or accentuates changes in society, and in some small way even helps readers to deal with these changes. It's often been said that reading horror fiction is a way of rehearsing death, of flirting with our own mortality without going all the way. Depending on how much credence you give this theory, you may or may not agree that H. P. Lovecraft owes some of his posthumous popularity to a shell-shocked post–World War II readership trying to come to terms with the fact that the universe just didn't care about humanity as much as they had once believed.
The Lovecraftian scholar S. T. Joshi describes Lovecraft's
philosophy of “cosmicism”—“the idea that, given the vastness of the universe both in space and in time, the human race (now no longer regarded as the special creation of a divine being) is of complete inconsequence
in the universe-at-large
[.]” Until the early twentieth century, though there were certainly divergent schools of thought, most Westerners believed that humankind was the dominant force in the world and had the right to use the world's resources as it saw fit. The Great Depression, Hitler, Stalin, Hiroshima, Zyklon-B, and other new atrocities delivered shattering blows to this perspective of divine right, already shaken by World War I. If this was where humanity's ascendance had led, perhaps it was time for humanity to be humbled.
Add ego to the philosophy of cosmicism and you're not too far from existentialism, which also took hold after World War II. Lovecraft, no egotist, had created not just a worldview but an entire
universe-view
in which humans were sometimes trifling insects, sometimes tools of Greater Powers, sometimes not even on the radar. Though various publishers spoke of collecting Lovecraft's stories during his lifetime, no Love-craft collection would exist until Derleth and Wandrei (as Arkham House) published
The Outsider and Others
in 1939, two years after his death. It sold very slowly, mostly to readers who already knew his work from
Weird Tales
and other pulp markets. In 1945 an Armed Services Edition paperback collection,
The Dunwich Horror and Other Weird Tales
, was released, and was quite widely distributed. Love-craft's work gained popularity over the next two decades, and in the early 1970s, Ballantine Books began reissuing his entire oeuvre in paperback. Whether or not one feels that the theory of cosmicism became more palatable in the second half of the twentieth century, it seems obvious that there was a time for Lovecraft to capture the popular imagination, and that time—sadly—did not come while he was alive.
It's ironic to think of H. P. Lovecraft as a writer ahead of his time, for he despised—or affected to despise—all things modern. A genteel poseur of his day, he felt uncomfortable
existing in the twentieth century and wished to live in Colonial days, affecting the attitudes of an eighteenth-century English Tory and professing loyalty to King George the Third. Later in life he was able to see the good qualities of other eras—“If I could create an ideal world,” he wrote, “it would be an England with the fire of the Elizabethans, the correct taste of the Georgians, and the refinement and pure ideals of the Victorians”—but seldom of his own day and age. He refused even to buy a modern suit until the style he was used to grew so obsolete that he could no longer find it.
Except for a brief sojourn in New York, Lovecraft always made his home in Providence, one of those cities where the past seems separated from the present by a very thin veil. In his fiction he traveled to exotic earthly lands (some more convincingly imagined than others) and explored realms never imagined by any other human, but even in his fiction it is Providence he loves best. In one of his few long works, “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward,” the protagonist's first memories are of “the great westward sea of hazy roofs and domes and steeples and far hills which he saw one winter afternoon from that great railed embankment, all violet and mystic against a fevered apocalyptic sunset of reds and golds and purples and curious greens.” Later, he roams “older and quainter levels of the ancient city … down vertical Jenckes Street with its back walls and Colonial gables to the shady Benefit Street corner … it was getting to be a slum here, but the titan elms cast a restoring shadow over the place, and the boy used to stroll south past the long lines of pre-Revolutionary homes with their great central chimneys and classic portals … the young Charles could picture them as they were when the street was new, and red heels and peri-wigs set off the painted pediments whose signs of wear were now becoming so visible.”
It seems fitting, then, that the epitaph on Lovecraft's tomb-stone reads simply, “I am Providence.” He certainly captured the essence of the city, and carried its essence within him; but the dictionary also defines
providence
as “foresight.” Though
he may not have intended it, Lovecraft gave future readers a new way of reading weird fiction and a new way of imagining the universe. Absolutely he is Providence in every sense of the word.
—P
OPPY
Z. B
RITE
, New Orleans, June 2002
Y
OU ASK ME
to explain why I am afraid of a draught of cool air; why I shiver more than others upon entering a cold room, and seem nauseated and repelled when the chill of evening creeps through the heat of a mild autumn day. There are those who say I respond to cold as others do to a bad odour, and I am the last to deny the impression. What I will do is to relate the most horrible circumstance I ever encountered, and leave it to you to judge whether or not this forms a suitable explanation of my peculiarity.
It is a mistake to fancy that horror is associated inextricably with darkness, silence, and solitude. I found it in the glare of midafternoon, in the clangour of a metropolis, and in the teaming midst of a shabby and commonplace rooming-house with a prosaic landlady and two stalwart men by my side. In the spring of 1923 I had secured some dreary and unprofitable magazine work in the city of New York; and being unable to pay any substantial rent, began drifting from one cheap boarding establishment to another in search of a room which might combine the qualities of decent cleanliness, endurable furnishings, and very reasonable price. It soon developed that I had only a choice between different evils, but after a time I came upon a house in West Fourteenth Street which disgusted me much less than the others I had sampled.
The place was a four-story mansion of brownstone, dating apparently from the late forties, and fitted with woodwork and marble whose stained and sullied splendour argued a descent from high levels of tasteful opulence. In the rooms, large and lofty, and decorated with impossible paper and
ridiculously ornate stucco cornices, there lingered a depressing mustiness and hint of obscure cookery; but the floors were clean, the linen tolerably regular, and the hot water not too often cold or turned off, so that I came to regard it as at least a bearable place to hibernate till one might really live again. The landlady, a slatternly, almost bearded Spanish woman named Herrero, did not annoy me with gossip or with criticisms of the late-burning electric light in my third-floor front hall room; and my fellow-lodgers were as quiet and un-communicative as one might desire, being mostly Spaniards a little above the coarsest and crudest grade. Only the din of street cars in the thoroughfare below proved a serious annoyance.
I had been there about three weeks when the first odd incident occurred. One evening at about eight I heard a spattering on the floor and became suddenly aware that I had been smelling the pungent odour of ammonia for some time. Looking about, I saw that the ceiling was wet and dripping; the soaking apparently proceeding from a corner on the side toward the street. Anxious to stop the matter at its source, I hastened to the basement to tell the landlady; and was assured by her that the trouble would quickly be set right.