The horror canon simply wouldn’t be the same without H.P. Lovecraft — the writer best known for creating Cthulhu, a winged Kraken-like creature, along with an entire mythos of similarly monstrous “Old Ones.” And though Lovecraft’s terrifying tales have been captivating readers for nearly a century now, there’s no time like the present to dive into his must-read works! Here’s a primer on the 10 best H.P. Lovecraft books, novellas, and stories to give you an idea of where to start. (And if you're hungry for more, you can always check out our guide to cosmic horror, the subgenre his works helped establish.)
Buy a cat, stay up late, don't drink: top 10 writers’ tips on writing
Made a New Year resolution to start writing that novel? Take some writing tips from Leo Tolstoy, Muriel Spark, John Steinbeck and other famous authors
Travis Elborough
Wed 3 Jan 2018
O
ver the past year, Helen Gordon and I have been putting together Being a Writer, a collection of musings, tips and essays from some of our favourite authors about the business of writing, ranging from the time of Samuel Johnson and Grub Street, to the age of Silicon Roundabout and Lorrie Moore.
Researching the book, it quickly became obvious that there isn’t a correct way to set about writing creatively, which is a liberating thought. For every novelist who needs to isolate themselves in a quiet office (Jonathan Franzen), there’s another who works best at the local coffee shop (Rivka Galchen) or who struggles to snatch an hour between chores and children (a young Alice Munro).
Conversely, it also became apparent that alongside all this variety of approach, there are certain ideas and pieces of advice that many writers hold in common. In an 1866 letter to Mrs Brookfield, Charles Dickens suggests that: “You constantly hurry your narrative ... by telling it, in a sort of impetuous breathless way, in your own person, when the people [characters] should tell it and act it for themselves.” Basically: SHOW DON’T TELL. Three words that will be familiar to anyone who has sat in a 21st-century creative writing class.
Our book therefore contains a lot of writing advice, ranging from the sternly practical to the gloriously idiosyncratic. We have writers talking about what went wrong, as well as what went right. They discuss failing to finish a manuscript, failing to find a publisher, badly realised characters and tortuous, unwieldy plots. Here are a just few of our favourite tips, which we believe any aspiring writer should take to heart.
1. Hilary Mantel – a little arrogance can be a great help
“The most helpful quality a writer can cultivate is self-confidence – arrogance, if you can manage it. You write to impose yourself on the world, and you have to believe in your own ability when the world shows no sign of agreeing with you.”
2. Leo Tolstoy and HP Lovecraft – pick the hours that work best for you
Tolstoy believed in starting first thing: “I always write in the morning. I was pleased to hear lately that Rousseau, too, after he got up in the morning, went for a short walk and sat down to work. In the morning one’s head is particularly fresh. The best thoughts most often come in the morning after waking while still in bed or during the walk.”
Or stay up late as HP Lovecraft did: “At night, when the objective world has slunk back into its cavern and left dreamers to their own, there come inspirations and capabilities impossible at any less magical and quiet hour. No one knows whether or not he is a writer unless he has tried writing at night.”
“Read, read, read everything – trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it. Then write. If it is good, you’ll find out. If it’s not, throw it out the window.”
4. Katherine Mansfield – writing anything is better than nothing
“Looking back I imagine I was always writing. Twaddle it was too. But better far write twaddle or anything, anything, than nothing at all.”
Hemingway writing while on a big game hunt in Kenya, September 1952. Photograph: Earl Theisen
“Always stop while you are going good and don’t worry about it until you start to write the next day. That way your subconscious will work on it all the time. But if you think about it consciously or worry bout it you will kill it and your brain will be tired before you start.”
John Steinbeck at Sag Harbor, 1962 … presumably after he’d finished his daily schedule. Photograph: Rolls Press
“Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page for each day. It helps.”
7. Miranda July – don’t worry about the bad drafts
“I was a lot dumber when I was writing the novel. I felt like worse of a writer … would come home every day from my office and say, ‘Well, I still really like the story, I just wish it was better written.’ At that point, I didn’t realise I was writing a first draft. And the first draft was the hardest part. From there, it was comparatively easy. It was like I had some Play-Doh to work with and could just keep working with it – doing a million drafts and things changing radically and characters appearing and disappearing and solving mysteries: Why is this thing here? Should I just take that away? And then realising, no, that is there, in fact, because that is the key to this. I love that sort of detective work, keeping the faith alive until all the questions have been sleuthed out.”
“It has become increasingly plain to me that the very excellent organisation of a long book or the finest perceptions and judgment in time of revision do not go well with liquor. A short story can be written on the bottle, but for a novel you need the mental speed that enables you to keep the whole pattern inside your head and ruthlessly sacrifice the sideshows … I would give anything if I hadn’t written Part III of Tender Is the Night entirely on stimulant.”
“Work on a computer that is disconnected from the internet.”
10. Muriel Spark* – get a cat
“If you want to concentrate deeply on some problem, and especially on some piece of writing or paper-work, you should acquire a cat. Alone with the cat in the room where you work … the cat will invariably get up on your desk and settle under the desk lamp. The light from a lamp … gives the cat great satisfaction. The cat will settle down and be serene, with a serenity that passes all understanding. And the tranquillity of the cat will gradually come to affect you, sitting there at your desk, so that all the excitable qualities that impeded your concentration compose themselves and give your mind back the self-command it has lost. You need not watch the cat all the time. Its presence alone is enough. The effect of a cat on your concentration is remarkable, and very mysterious.’
*(or rather, the character of Mrs Hawkins in A Far Cry from Kensington.)
Being a Writer by Travis Elborough and Helen Gordon is published by Frances Lincoln, priced £15.
He had one of the bleakest worldviews ever committed to paper, was racist – and could be a terrible writer. So why is HP Lovecraft more popular than ever?
David Barnett Monday 3 June 2013 15.25 BST
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ot only was the work of Howard Phillips Lovecraft uniformly bleak, but what he did write was sometimes execrable. Take this random passage from a 1985 HP Lovecraft omnibus: "But oddly enough, the worthy gentleman owned himself most impalpably disquieted by a mere minor detail. On the huge mahogany table there lay face downward a badly worn copy of Borellus, bearing many cryptical marginalia and interlineations in Curwen's hand."
Howard Phillips Lovecraft was born on this day in 1890. We celebrate his birthday with 10 titbits about the father of weird and wonderful horror
Sian Cain Wednesday 20 August 2014 14.22 BST
1. Both his mother and father were separately committed to the same mental institution
Winfield Scott Lovecraft was committed to Butler Hospital after being diagnosed with psychosis when HP Lovecraft was only three years old. He died in 1898, when HP was eight. To this day, rumours persist that Winfield had syphilis, but neither HP nor his mother ever displayed symptoms.
Sarah Susan Phillips Lovecraft was later committed to Butler in 1919. She remained in close correspondence with her son for two years, until she died of complications after surgery.
HP Lovecraft was a master of fantastic horror tales, but the hate which drove his work was all too real.
Chris Power Wednesday 7 November 200708.00 GMT
It seems at once germane and perverse, when still within a grave's length of Halloween, to dedicate the next post in my survey of the short story to a man who traded in horror, yet whose creations won't ever be costumes clothing the world's trick-or-treaters. That said, if anyone rang my bell dressed as the Dark Young of Shub-Niggurath - writhing masses of ropy black tentacles with multiple puckered mouths - or any other spawn of Howard Phillips Lovecraft's furiously dark imagination, I wouldn't be dilatory in dishing out the sweets.
Lovecraft's fictional oeuvre - more than 50 stories written between 1905 and his death in 1937 - is unremittingly bleak. Heavily influenced by, among others, Edgar Allan Poe, Lord Dunsany and Algernon Blackwood, Lovecraft went several rungs lower than his forebears by eradicating any shred of optimism from his tales of what he called "cosmic horror".
Lovecraft's world, now known as the "Cthulhu Mythos" has gone on to be a common source for Jorge Luis Borges and a host of other, lesser authors. This is a world where humanity exists in the shadow of ancient, monstrous, slumbering extraterrestrial beings who are occasionally woken and to whom we are as insignificant as microbes in a petri dish.
From a purely stylistic perspective, the weight of dread Lovecraft can summon is extraordinary, although when excerpted certain passages can seem preposterously overblown. In their proper context, however, his hallucinatory moments erupt to shocking effect from prose otherwise characterised by its dry, scholarly tone: in this manner, time and again, reason is invoked only to be torn to shreds and tossed into a midden, which is pretty much what Lovecraft thought the world amounted to.
This monomaniacal vision results in a great deal of repetition throughout the stories, both thematically and at the level of the sentence. Discovered journals reoccur; moons are invariably "gibbous" and horrors "eldritch", "unnameable" or "unspeakable", while every character is either headed for a padded cell, disappearing into a gaping maw or recording their final thoughts as murderous cultists descend on them.
But rather than being tedious, these repetitions become instead something insidiously ritualised. The real horror, one that multiplies if several stories are read in succession, is generated by their obsessive reaffirmation of life's mindless cycle. But rejecting Lovecraft's toweringly bleak outlook doesn't preclude appreciation of these compellingly weird fictions.
The most successful of Lovecraft's stories, such as The Whisperer in Darkness (1930) or The Call of Cthulhu (1926), are elaborate in construction and measured in their revelations, generating atmospheres of dread that are difficult to shake off. Add to this their interconnectedness, from the fictional New England settings of Arkham and Miskatonic University (Alma Mater to numerous doomed students and professors) to the rites, tentacled beasts and visions of alien, non-Euclidian cities that recur. What emerges is a unique blending of place and theme similar to Tolkien's Middle Earth or the Paris of Balzac's Comédie Humaine.
In the best traditions of science fiction, Lovecraft was also quick to incorporate contemporary discoveries into his work. At the Mountains of Madness (1931) makes use of continental drift theory, still controversial at the time, while the discovery of Pluto in 1930 was immediately accorded an ominous relevance in The Whisperer in Darkness. Similarly, Planck's quantum theory and Einsteinian relativity were rapidly co-opted into his work and squared with his beliefs, just as youthful readings of Darwin had proven to him the non-existence of the human soul.
There is another aspect to this strange body of work, however, much less discussed than its horror. Following an unhappy period in the mid-1920s living amid New York's immigrant community, Lovecraft's previously amorphous racism became focused and rabid. Michel Houellebecq believes this shift is what impelled the "mad rhythmic pulse of cursed sentences" that streak his greatest works, beginning with The Call of Cthulhu. In these stories the sects that worship his monstrous creations are invariably non-whites or uneducated, rural whites, and Lovecraft asserts - in terms uncomfortably close to contemporary fascist rhetoric - that through their actions these "lower breeds" are hastening humanity's end.
It's a repugnant viewpoint, and presents a difficulty with which anyone who can be said to "enjoy" Lovecraft's work must tussle. Because the forms lurking in his work, albeit draped in phantasmagorical disguise, aren't really beings from beyond, but manifestations of a very human hatred.