Howard Phillips Lovecraft began his horror classic, “The Call of Cthulhu” (Weird Tales, February 1928) with: “The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.” Thus he stakes his ground with such a manifesto of fear. This sentence says very simply, we don’t understand all that is in our own minds, but implies so much more as well. What lurks outside us is so much scarier, and it is only our inability to really grasp it all that saves us. Such is the case of some of the characters in the story like Inspector LeGrasse, a police officer who stumbles upon a cult worshipping a being called Cthulhu. But not in the case of poor Professor Angell, descendent of the narrator, who perceives too much and is driven insane by the sheer magnitude of his discovery of the unknown. In this case, the actual existence of the Great Old One, who dwells under Ryleh, waiting for the stars to be right, so he can reclaim the Earth.
There is another larger point to this simple opening statement, one that I feel separates the men from the mental. As a horror fan of long standing, a student of all things Lovecraftian — and one who drives his wife crazy every time she wants to see a movie, with my singular critical question, “Does it have monsters in it?” Why the eternal (and in my wife’s opinion “damned”) quest for monsters?– would I want to be like poor Mary the servant girl in Arthur Machen’s “The Great God Pan”? screaming myself insane as I saw what reality truly looked like? Or Justin Geoffrey, the poet in Robert E. Howard’s “The Black Stone”, whose lyrics and research drive him to the edge of madness? I mean, I have written dark poetry occasionally, so is it an occupational hazard like carpal tunnel syndrome? And why don’t others have the same obsession?
Here’s the rub. H. P. Lovecraft knows his readers will fall into two groups: those who share his love of the terror tales, especially those exploring the fear of the unknown, the monstrous and unnameable. And then there are the others. Lovecraft once fought a pointless battle against such folk in the letter columns of The Argosy and All-Story, where he spilled his venom on forgettable Romance writer, Fred Jackson. Yes, Lovecraft drew that line. The ones who shun horror fiction, call it diseased, immoral, disturbed, who will not be dragged from their romantic comedies, their James Bond spy fantasies, their routine Westerns, dragged kicking and screaming like a Lovecraft protagonist who records how the tentacles drag him down onto that final scribbled scream of death. Lovecraft has drawn the line. Horror fans, seekers of terrors and marvels here, everybody else there. It is a mercy to be unable to correlate the weird and horrific. Lovecraft congratulates us in that opening line. Good for you, you can’t understand what I hold most dear. But as one of the damned, on the other side of the line, I can’t quite envy those who are satisfied with game shows, predictable Disney fare, reality TV, with the safe and the stale. I guess, and I think Lovecraft would agree, our choice is to stare into Hell, rather than live it.
Coda: This little tirade got me thinking about the VERY FIRST books I owned that turned the tide. It wasn’t Lovecraft. I only got into him in 1985 with the purchase of the Call of Cthulhu RPG. Here are the very first books I “owned” (as in it was mine and no one would ever own it after me) and read.
This is the book that made me a reader. Before Tarzan I hated reading. No wonder! I hadn’t met Edgar Rice Burroughs yet. The Neal Adams cover spoke to me. I had to have it and I wanted to read excitement like that.
In the throws of all things ERB, a neighbor girl gave this book since she didn’t like it. It was my first REH book. That Jeff Jones cover got me past the little voice that said “It’s not Burroughs!” I am so glad it did.
Some good points here