The Master of Horror

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

August DerlethAcross from Lueders Road in St. Aloysius Cemetery, Sauk City, Wisconsin, is the grave of August Derleth, founding editor-publisher of Arkham House. On the other side of that road is Arkham House itself, the place where Derleth devoted the last thirty-two years of his life ushering macabre writers out of the obscurity of the pulps and into the hardcovers of an entirely new niche in genre fiction. “I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life,” reads Derleth’s epitaph, in Thoreau’s words, “and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” A prolific writer of everything from regional Midwestern literature, children’s books, and Sherlock Holmes pastiches to supernatural horror, Derleth’s career in writing was a lifelong venture into strange woods. But of all the unbeaten paths he took along the way—as parole officer, Wisconsin Education Board president, literary editor, university lecturer, and novelist—unarguably his foray into publishing was his most important contribution to literature.

Like all good tales of death and necrophilia, the story of Arkham House begins not with its founding but in the passing of a close friend: H.P. Lovecraft. Like Edgar Allan Poe, whose writing style is cited above all other influences for informing the stylistic conventions of the weird fiction genre, Lovecraft and his literary accomplishments went largely unnoticed and unappreciated during his lifetime. Both masters of horror suffered a similar fate: to die deranged, penniless, and unread, in great physical pain and psychological misery.

H.P. Lovecraft (by Antonio José)Literary critics often write off H.P. Lovecraft as a hack who suffered from rampant “adjectivitis” and an affliction known as misanthropy. Lovecraft was many things, including a racist, a social Darwinist, a fascist, a misogynist, an anti-Semite, and a misanthrope—but he was not a hack. Part of what has ushered Lovecraft into the literary canon is exactly his “purple prose” and his rejection of the staid dictates of literary realism—the same can be said of Edgar Allan Poe. In the English translation of H. P. Lovecraft: Against The World, Against Life, the French novelist and critic Michel Houellebecq argues that Lovecraft’s esoteric style amounts to an subversion of literary realism. Lovecraft’s overdescription of the abstract is an exercise in the failure of literary realism to come to terms with the truly alien forces that he believed were at work in the universe. Lovecraft was an avowed atheist, rationalist, and materialist, whose “cosmicist” philosophy can be described as an inversion of Enlightenment principles. Not only does cosmicism reject all of humanism’s anthropocentric notions, but it casts humanity as an unimportant part of a cosmos governed by alien forces that are ultimately indifferent to human ideals. Lovecraft’s “God” is helpless and inane, existing outside the human definitions of good and evil:

[Outside] the ordered universe [is] that amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blasphemes and bubbles at the center of all infinity—the boundless daemon sultan Azathoth, whose name no lips dare speak aloud, and who gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time and space amidst the muffled, maddening beating of vile drums and the thin monotonous whine of accursed flutes. - The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kaddath

Understandably, fans and scholars of Lovecraft would be upset when August Derleth, in expanding upon Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos, reinterpreted the mythology through a Judeo-Christian lens by describing its “gods” as corresponding to the four elements and dividing them into camps of good and evil alignment.
Michel Houellebecq, Against the World, Against LifeAt the same time, Lovecraft’s fans owe their enthusiasm for Lovecraft’s work to the same man, for without Derleth’s tenacity, the Cthulhu Mythos and its creator would have disappeared into oblivion shortly after his death.

On March 10, 1937, Lovecraft died of malnutrition and intestinal cancer, believing himself a literary failure. He only wrote for two magazines other than Weird Tales—Amazing Stories and Home Brew. None of his stories were ever successfully published in book form; in 1924, he wrote Shunned House, which was printed in 1928 by Recluse Press, but was never bound or distributed. G.P. Putnam’s Sons rejected Lovecraft’s stories, and even At the Mountains of Madness did not initially make it into print. His autobiography, published posthumously, was entitled “Some Notes on a Nonentity.”