“There are my ‘Poe’ pieces and my ‘Dunsany’ pieces,” H.P. Lovecraft wrote to a friend in 1929, “but alas—where are any Lovecraft pieces?” By the average standards of authorial self-criticism, Lovecraft was considered something of an extreme case. He would hold some of his stories, including those especially prized by fans today, from publication for years, and he was invariably disappointed with those he did see through to publication. Despite his wistful question, by then Lovecraft had already written many of his “Lovecraft pieces”—“The Colour Out of Space,” “The Call of Cthulhu,” “The Dunwich Horror,” and one of his few novels, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, which he shelved for being “a creaking bit of self-conscious antiquarianism”—with more to follow. The more nagging problem was that they were not widely read, and that would not improve until after his death in 1937.

Lovecraft satisfies the great artistic creation myth that also befell contemporary outsiders like Franz Kafka and Nathanael West: falling in life only to rise in death, and all before reaching age fifty. Yet here, too, Lovecraft is an exceptional case. It is one thing to be critically canonized (both West’s and Lovecraft’s entire bodies of work—which are, admittedly, not extensive—have been published by the Library of America) and aesthetically codified (the adjectives Kafkaesque and Lovecraftian are dropped when no other words are able to capture something punishingly absurd or vividly horrifying); it is another to inspire something close to obsession in the annals of popular culture. Nor is Lovecraft’s presence limited to film adaptations and literary homages, though both are pervasive.

[continues:
at 
http://laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/cosmic_errors ]  Courtesy Joe Megalos

Todd Mason
http://socialistjazz.blogspot.com/2017/04/ffb-eighth-stage-of-fandom-by-robert.html
http://socialistjazz.blogspot.com/2017/04/a-century-of-robert-bloch-born-5-april.html
http://socialistjazz.blogspot.com/2017/04/robert-bloch-gallery-andrew-porter-and.html

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