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By
Carman
Dead Rebel Of The Week
~ H.P. Lovecraft ~
To be honest, I don’t know much about the life Howard Phillips Lovecraft. I do know it was pretty uneventful, but fuck, people don’t say he was an influence because of his wild life of Romanesque orgies and week long coke binges. It’s his legacy we pray at the feet of!
Here is what I do know about Lovecraft.
He was a sickly but brilliant child. He had very little formal education, and was a junkie for science and religion.
His obsession with those two subjects, science and religion, enabled him to create his own Lovecraft Mythology. The creation he is most famous for is Cthulhu and the Outer Gods. In short, they are our overlords. The Cthulhu Mythos took form in or around 1926 in a short story, aptly titled “Call of Cthulhu”. In it, an average man discovers the notes left by his uncle, who died very suddenly. Going through these notes, the guy soon discovers cults who want nothing more but the world to become an orgy of blissful violence. Pretty twisted for the era in which it was published. Pretty damn avant-garde stuff. The Cthulhu mythos is still being expanded on to this day, by hordes of his disciples writing their own sequels and stories, all published by Arkham House publishing. Arkham is the fictitious city most Lovecraft stories take place in.
He also invented the Necronomicon, which has become a staple of the idiot Satanist’s required reading. It was purported to have been written on human flesh, inked in human blood, and bound in human skin and bone, by “The mad Arab, Abdul Al Hazred”. If you come across this book, and buy it, shoot yourself in the face. Lovecraft never even wrote the book, but invented it as a plot device for a great body of his work. Other authors and screen writers have used variations of this book in some of their works. The Necronomicon is cast as a main crook book in countless of movies, totally unrelated to the Lovecraft mythos, but serving as some sort of anti-Bible.
Anyway, Lovecraft’s work was way ahead of its time. The horrors of the unknown and things that should not be, those were his specialty. He had a knack for describing unspeakable horror, creeping fear and lurking death, and was heavily criticized as a sick and a mad man for what his typewriter produced back then. (Did they have typewriters back then? Goose pen, then. Whatever.) Stories of fathers stealing the bodies of their daughters. Wives mating with what amounts to demons so the Outer Gods can take physical form on Earth. Demonic children, wicked families, mad scientists, possession... the list can go on forever. It’s all the good stuff modern horror is made up of, almost half a century before the world caught on.
The fact of the matter is THIS. Without HP Lovecraft, Stephen King would just be the creep English teacher at the Bangor Main High School, Anne Rice would be selling Harlequin books, and “Master of Puppets” by Metallica would never have been written. Think about this; in Pirates of the Caribbean 2, when Davy Jones summons The Kraken, how many people knew that was an actual myth, and not just a rip off from a classic Cthulhu tale? I know I didn’t, at first. Only when I looked it up, did I see that I had it backwards. But that is the influence Lovecraft had. He was able to take something, like the legend of the Giant Squid, and make it horrifying to those not on the sea.
Like Stephen King would do years later, Lovecraft used New England as a stage for his stories. The fictional towns of Arkham, Kingsport, and Dunwich for starters. He also peppered in his xenophobia, but that is to be expected, most writers of the time were. The world was a scary place and E.T. would have been lynched from a tree back then.
Lovecraft is also considered one of the most prolific letter writers of the 20th century. Most of his pen pals were fellow writers from around the globe (this is in the days before e-mails and fed-ex), and his correspondence varied from known geniuses like Albert Einstein to the lowliest scrub in some boondocks somewhere. Robert E. Howard, author of Conan, and Robert Bloch, author of Psycho, were both correspondents of Lovecraft. There is no telling how much his letters to all these writers, thinkers and scientists actually influenced their achievements. If you read Lovecraft's work, you will see his creations in movies like Alien, The Thing, and I will even go so far as to say Spongebob Squarepants. His influence is everywhere. Like Edgar Allan Poe's morbid and much more evil twin soul.
Lovecraft was also what would later be known as Straight Edge, although I doubt he carved the ever so fashionable XXX into his chest and beat people up for smoking. He lived a life of simplicity, and had he not become a writer, he would have excelled in any other field he was in. He was that kind of guy.
He died of stomach cancer at the age of 47. He was broke as a dick and living with his aunt at the time. But just like everyone worth a damn, he was remembered years afterwards by those in a time who understood his work. I leave you with his most famous (and uber-cool) quote:
That is not dead which can eternal lie.
And with strange eons, even death may die.
A dude who can think up shit like that should be worshiped! (OK, shut up. NOW I am leaving!)
Our savior
The Bane of the Necronomicon
