The Outsider, Pickman's Model, and The Call of Cthulhu, by H.P. Lovecraft

Howard Phillips Lovecraft

This is where I lose friends and acquaintances. This is where I lose the last bits of respect anybody might still have for my opinions. This is where I commit the most heinous of all literary crimes: Critique H.P. Lovecraft.

I will admit that I’ve attempted a few times to read his works, yet rarely got past the first page. This assignment forced me to soldier beyond the opening lines and into the heart of each work. And I’ll admit: I’m not impressed.

This entry will cover the three short stories in the same order as the blog title, followed by a brief overview of his writing style in general. Overall, I tried to keep in mind that these stories are nearly a century old, and were most likely the progenitors of many of the tropes that seem common place today.

The Outsider

I'm... I'm beautiful!

This story was… simple. Yet difficult to explain. We see the story through the monster’s eyes (is he a mummy, zombie, or something else?) By the end of the book the creature is described as something that is most likely a dead thing. And apparently very adept at journaling. It’s a first-person romp about a creature rising from the grave and all it wants to do is see what the party’s all about. Of course, he/it doesn’t know he/it is a horrible-looking creature because he/it has never seen a mirror… until the end. I hated the end because it insulted my intelligence. Lovecraft felt he needed to spell it out for me, even though I long ago used my context clues to figure it all out. But, hey, simpler times I suppose.

But the ending isn’t what’s important. It’s the beginning. At least to a writer, it should be the important part because Lovecraft does a good job of explaining what it might be like to be dead (or something), and raises a few good questions about the afterlife. The key question he poses through this story is: do we remember our lives after we’re dead, or are our memories completely wiped and we just exist? That’s how our character begins. He just exists, with no memory of how he exists or how he survived as long as he has without being taught or taken care of. It raises interesting philosophical questions.

But beyond that it’s just a short story, one that I imagine he wrote as a tangent from other, longer works.

"I call it, "Bowl of Fruit on a Midsummer Morning."

Pickman’s Model

This is my favorite of the trio. Again, written in first person as a story one character is telling another, this story is less about the “twist” ending, and more about the narrative journey. It’s well done as we see our protagonist quickly and consistency work himself into a fervor as he recounts why he no longer sees a certain artist (the titular Richard Upton Pickman). I was hooked from the first page (perhaps if I’d tried to read this story first instead of one of his others, I’d have read more Lovecraft before this assignment), wanting—no, needing—the answer as to what was in the artist’s cellar. Lovecraft also did a great job of putting me in Boston and provided a great guide for my trip.

Again, the twist ending wasn’t amazing, though I suspect it was considered fresh at the time.

The Call of Cthulhu

Those Seaquest: DSV brats and their stupid dolphin

just can't leave well enough alone.

Oh, but I need to tread cautiously through this one.

I wasn’t a fan.

So much for treading softly.

But hear me out, please. The narrative: great. The plot: awesome. The end: meh, but still okay.

It was the beginning that took me out of the story and never let me get back into it.

I read this one first, seeing as it’s the classic Lovecraft that all should know and love. After a couple false starts as I tried to put myself in the mood to get through early 20^th century prose, I finally come across this:

                “Theosophists have guessed at the awesome grandeur of the cosmic cycle wherein our world and human race form transient incidents. They have hinted at strange survival in terms which would freeze the blood if not masked by bland optimism. But it is not from them that there came the single glimpse of forbidden aeons which chills me when I think of it and maddens me when I dream of it. That glimpse, like all dread glimpses of truth, flashed out from an accidental piecing together of separated things – in this case an old newspaper item and the notes of a dead professor. I hope that no one else will accomplish this piecing out; certainly, if I live, I shall never knowingly supply a link in so hideous a chain.”

And then—get this—he pieces it all together for us! He didn’t just supply a link, he forged the whole damn chain! I’m reading along and all I can think is that there’s got to be something that happens at the end to cause this manuscript to be lost to all of time. Perhaps it ends up in R’lyeh? Maybe he just set it on fire. I could have let him get away with that instead of how it ended up: in a tin box, which he admits an executor may see should he die! “Oh, I hope nobody figures this out like I did, so I’m going to put this in a box of other mysterious items that nobody would ever be interested in.”

It reminds me of an episode of The Simpsons where Bart goes to play at Ralph Wiggum’s house. His dad, the police chief, catches them playing in a closet and asks, “What is so fascinating about my Forbidden Closet of Mystery?”

What is so fascinating about the Forbidden Tin Box of Mystery?

Beyond that, it was a fun read when I could focus. It’s a mish-mash of found papers, word-of-mouth tales, and old-fashioned detective work. Lovecraft creates such a vivid image of Cthulhu, the Old Ones and the places they dwell that it is no wonder his works survive today and have taken on “cult” status (see what I did there?).

Overall Impressions

H.P. Lovecraft was a gifted literary writer. I believe his work transcends traditional genre fiction not just because of his vocabulary, but how he weaves his work together. Of the three stories I read, I recall scant—if any—usage of dialogue. I flipped through a collection of his works and found very little usage of dialogue throughout. So, even though his stories are told from a variety of first-person characters, It appears to always be told in the same voice, and I would believe it to be his own. That’s not necessarily bad, but I can see how Lovecraft as a person is more well-known than his works. I’ll continue to read him since I have so many of his stories in the myriad collections I’ve downloaded/bought, and I will come back and revise this paragraph if my feelings change.

Lastly, in each story there comes a point where the “horror is beyond description” (paraphrased). That just seems lazy to me. You can always try to describe something. Each time I read that, a gaping hole opened in the universe he created. It made me sad because I so wanted to see what the protagonist was seeing.

*I’ve read a few other critiques of his work following my writing of this, and found I wasn’t the only person who took issue with his “beyond description” descriptions. Maybe I won’t be keel-hauled for this after all…