Looking at Lovecraft

“Sometimes I believe that this less material life is our truer life, and that our vain presence on the terraqueous globe is itself the secondary or merely virtual phenomenon.”

—H.P. Lovecraft, “Beyond The Wall of Sleep”

Maybe it was the “night gaunts” who terrorized his childhood dreams or his father’s psychosis and hospitalization in Rhode Island’s Butler Hospital when the younger Lovecraft was only three (the cause was actually syphilis) that inspired him. Whatever the reason, Good ol’ HP—Howard Phillips Lovecraft—believer in cosmic horror with his human-nullifying entities, magical rites and forbidden lore, churned out reams of darkness. He’s been called the E.A. Poe of the 20th Century. For those unfamiliar with the Lovecraftean abyss, we offer up a playful primer (just darling) as an introduction to his vision and a lovely list of his works from which to pick and choose.

1897: The Little Glass Bottle

1898: The Secret Cave or John Lees Adventure

1898: The Mystery of the Grave-Yard

1902: The Mysterious Ship

1905: The Beast in the Cave

1908: The Alchemist

1917: The Tomb

1917: Dagon

1917: A Reminiscence of Dr. Samuel Johnson

1917: Sweet Ermengarde

1918: Polaris

1918/19: The Green Meadow (with Winifred V. Jackson)

1919: Beyond the Wall of Sleep

1919: Memory

1919: Old Bugs

1919: The Transition of Juan Romero

1919: The White Ship

1919: The Doom That Came to Sarnath

1919: The Statement of Randolph Carter

1920: The Terrible Old Man

1920: The Tree

1920: The Cats of Ulthar

1920: The Temple

1920: Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family

1920: Poetry and the Gods (with Anna Helen Crofts)

1920: Celephaïs

1920: From Beyond

1920: Nyarlathotep

1920: The Picture in the House

1920/21: The Crawling Chaos (with Winifred V. Jackson)

1920/21: Ex Oblivione

1921: The Nameless City

1921: The Quest of Iranon

1921: The Moon-Bog

1921: The Outsider

1921: The Other Gods

1921: The Music of Erich Zann

1921: Herbert West—Reanimator

1922: Hypnos

1922: What the Moon Brings

1922: Azathoth

1922: The Horror at Martin’s Beach (with Sonia H. Greene)

1922: The Hound

1922: The Lurking Fear

1923 The Rats in the Walls

1923: The Unnamable

1923: Ashes (with C. M. Eddy, Jr.)

1923: The Ghost-Eater (with C. M. Eddy, Jr.)

1923: The Loved Dead (with C. M. Eddy, Jr.)

1923: The Festival

1924: Deaf, Dumb, and Blind (with C. M. Eddy, Jr.)

1924: Under the Pyramids (with Harry Houdini)

1924: The Shunned House

1925: The Horror at Red Hook

1925: In the Vault

1926: Cool Air

1926: The Call of Cthulhu

1926: Two Black Bottles (with Wilfred Blanch Talman)

1926: Pickman’s Model

1926: The Silver Key

1926: The Strange High House in the Mist

1926: The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath

1927: The Case of Charles Dexter Ward

1927: The Colour Out of Space

1927: The Very Old Folk

1927: The Thing in the Moonlight (spurious)

1927: The Last Test (with Adolphe de Castro)

1927: History of the Necronomicon

1928: The Curse of Yig (with Zealia Bishop)

1929: The Mound (with Zealia Bishop)

1930: Medusa’s Coil (with Zealia Bishop)

1930: The Whisperer in Darkness

1931: At the Mountains of Madness

1931: Discarded Draft of The Shadow Over Innsmouth

1931: The Shadow Over Innsmouth

late 1931: The Trap (with Henry S. Whitehead)

1932: The Dreams in the Witch House

1932: The Man of Stone (with Hazel Heald)

1932: The Horror in the Museum (with Hazel Heald)

1932: Through the Gates of the Silver Key (with E. Hoffmann Price)

1933: Winged Death (with Hazel Heald)

1933: Out of the Aeons (with Hazel Heald)

1933/35: The Horror in the Burying-Ground (with Hazel Heald)

1933: The Hoard of the Wizard-Beast (with R. H. Barlow)

1933: The Slaying of the Monster (with R. H. Barlow)

1934: The Tree on the Hill (with Duane W. Rimel)

1934: The Battle that Ended the Century (with R. H. Barlow)

1934: The Shadow Out of Time

1935: “Till A’ the Seas” (with R.H. Barlow)

1935: Collapsing Cosmoses (with R.H. Barlow)

1935: The Challenge from Beyond (with C. L. Moore; A. Merritt; Robert E. Howard, and Frank Belknap Long)

1935: The Disinterment (with Duane W. Rimel)

1935: The Diary of Alonzo Typer (with William Lumley)

1935: The Haunter of the Dark

1936: In the Walls of Eryx (with Kenneth Sterling)

1936: The Night Ocean (with R.H. Barlow)

“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 meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”

—H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu, 1926

—Erin Orison, DEAD LOVE/the Daily Slice