The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
H. P. Lovecraft · the weird tales of Lovecraft’s maturity as the body is read, from “Dagon”, written in 1917, to “The Haunter of the Dark” in 1935, not the dream tales, the poems, the revisions for clients or the letters · first printed mostly in Weird Tales and other pulps from 1919, several only after his death in 1937, and first collected by Arkham House in The Outsider and Others (1939) · scored on Lovecraft’s English in the corrected texts that date from S. T. Joshi’s work in the 1980s; read from knowledge, with no text in hand, and only words that are certain are quoted
Mode
The weird tale married to the scientific report: the testimony, the statement, the deposition, the assembled papers and the account of an expedition, in one body
Mythos
The outer gods, vast and indifferent to man; the forbidden book; the scholar undone by what he correlates; the blood that calls and the return to the sea; the deep time in which man is a passing tenant
Phase
Each tale a retrospect from after the disclosure; the body written from 1917 to 1935, its major tales clustering from 1926
Presentation
Fiction; tales and short novels, nearly all of the weighed ones a first-person testimony or a document, the climax a disclosure in the last paragraph or the last line
Register
Dread, awe and disgust; a learned, archaic and Latinate prose, heavy with adjectives, rising to the cosmic and insisting on the unspeakable; and in one old man’s monologue a sustained dialect voice
Scale
A single scholar facing the true order of the cosmos, and a deep time measured in millions of years
Governing Proposition
Across the weird tales of eighteen years, most of the great ones in the last ten, Lovecraft moved the tale of terror from the ghost and the devil to beings from outside space and time, indifferent rather than malign, married it to the scientific report, gave it deep time, and built across many tales one cosmology with its gods, its forbidden book, its sacred geography and its liturgy, which became a common myth other writers entered. The wager of the body is that the cosmos is indifferent to man, that human history is an episode in a deep time that dwarfs it, and that knowledge of this is not a liberation but a harm: the scholar who correlates what he has found is destroyed or transformed by it, and the form of the tale, a testimony assembled from documents, makes the reader do the correlating.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The body has no single book of its author’s making. Lovecraft printed his tales one by one, mostly in Weird Tales and the other pulps, from 1919, and the pulp texts were often altered by their editors. In his lifetime he saw one book of his tales, The Shadow over Innsmouth (Visionary Publishing, 1936), and that badly printed. He died poor in 1937, at forty-six, and several of the tales were printed only after his death, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward in 1941. Arkham House, founded by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei in 1939, first collected him that year, in The Outsider and Others. The texts stayed corrupt, in the pulps and in Derleth’s editions, until S. T. Joshi’s work of the 1980s corrected them. The unit is the body as it is now read.
That body is bounded on three sides. It is the weird fiction of his maturity, from “Dagon”, written in 1917, to “The Haunter of the Dark” in 1935. It leaves out the Dunsanian dream tales, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath among them, the poems, the revisions ghost-written for clients and the letters; Supernatural Horror in Literature enters only where it bears on the tales. The great tales cluster late: “The Rats in the Walls” in 1924; “The Call of Cthulhu”, written in 1926 and printed in 1928; “The Colour Out of Space” in 1927; “The Dunwich Horror” in 1929; “The Whisperer in Darkness” in 1931; At the Mountains of Madness and “The Shadow over Innsmouth”, both written in 1931 and printed in 1936; and “The Shadow Out of Time”, written in 1934 and 1935 and printed in 1936. Behind them stand “The Music of Erich Zann”, “The Outsider”, “Pickman’s Model”, “The Dreams in the Witch House”, “The Thing on the Doorstep”, “The Haunter of the Dark” and Charles Dexter Ward.
Lovecraft named his inheritance himself, in Supernatural Horror in Literature: Poe above all, Machen’s “The Great God Pan”, Blackwood’s “The Willows”, Dunsany’s invented pantheon, and behind them the Gothic of ghost, curse and sin, in which horror punishes the sinner. The tales turn it. The horror is no longer supernatural but material, beings from outside space and time, indifferent rather than malign, in a universe where horror is merely what is true. He married the weird tale to the scientific report, the expedition, the geologist, the mathematician, and gave it deep time. The turn was made in the pulps, by a writer whom the publishers he respected turned away. Machen and Blackwood had already reached toward the outer and the impersonal, and the form he kept, the confession that ends on a revelation, was Poe’s: the turn is in the matter more than in the manner.
Movement II
“The Call of Cthulhu” opens on the finding of the whole body: “The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.” The paragraph goes on to the “placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity” on which mankind lives. The cosmos is indifferent to man; human history is an episode in a deep time that dwarfs it; and knowledge of this is not a liberation but a harm. After Darwin, Lyell and the new astronomy that is a true condition, and the tales do not argue it. They make it felt.
The tale is built as its first sentence fears. It is three documents, and the narrator correlates them: a sculptor’s dream, a police inspector’s raid on a cult, a sailor’s log. Each is required, and the correlation is the horror. Told as one straight narrative, the tale would lose what it knows, that knowledge itself is the danger. The same form serves the body throughout: the retrospective testimony, the statement, the deposition, the collection of papers, the report, its climax a disclosure in the last paragraph or the last line. The narrator who resists what he knows makes the reader do the knowing, and the reader reaches the end a step before him.
“The Colour Out of Space” is the same law at the scale of one farm. The meteorite, the blighted farm, the rotting fruit and the neighbours’ talk, the well: the tale moves from one to the next without a scene to spare, and its escalation is the most exactly made in the body. At the end the trees glow and the colour goes back up into the sky, and a blasted heath remains. What undoes the farm has no malice and no meaning for it. Set beside the Great Race of “The Shadow Out of Time”, minds migrating across millions of years, the backwoods farm obeys the same law: the local and the cosmic are one scale read at two magnifications.
Movement III
At the Mountains of Madness is a report written to stop an expedition, so that its form is a warning. Its heights are the body’s highest: the Antarctic city seen from the air above the plateau, and the descent through it to the shoggoth’s piping, “Tekeli-li!” The sciences of the day, geology, biology, mathematics and physics, enter the tales as orders of reality, and the pseudo-scholarship makes the invented sound read. But the same tale gives several of its twelve parts to a reading of the Old Ones’ history from the bas-reliefs, which the story does not need at that length.
In “The Call of Cthulhu” R’lyeh rises with its geometry wrong, a door opening at an angle the sailors cannot hold in mind. In “The Shadow Out of Time” the Great Race keep a library, and the narrator finds there a manuscript in his own hand, written millions of years before; the tale turns on that document. The Great Race hold humanity as one passing tenant of the earth. This is the dreadful sublime of scale, cold and vast, and it recurs across the body: few writers in English of the century rise to the cosmic so often.
The heights are often announced before they are made. At the moment the sentence should show, the prose insists on the unspeakable, and “unnamable”, “blasphemous”, “eldritch” and “cyclopean” recur from tale to tale. The sublime is of one register: there is no warm elevation anywhere, and the law of the body is never tested against love, society or comedy, where it might bend. Dialogue outside dialect is stiff, the characters are scarcely made, and endings are signalled pages ahead; the italicised last line, “it was a photograph from life” in “Pickman’s Model”, is often a mechanism rather than the form thinking. The charges fall on The Inevitable and The Made, and on the template the body repeats: a scholar, a document, a resistance, a disclosure foreseen.
Movement IV
Across tales written over a decade Lovecraft built a cosmology. It has its gods, Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth, Azathoth and Nyarlathotep; its forbidden book, the Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred; its sacred geography, Arkham, Miskatonic University, Innsmouth, Dunwich and Kingsport; and its liturgy, the chant “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn” and the couplet “That is not dead which can eternal lie, / And with strange aeons even death may die.” The myth is not evoked but built, and it is load-bearing: each tale takes its meaning from its place in it, and the myth was open, so that others could build in it.
“The Shadow over Innsmouth” shows the myth at its fullest weight. The old drunkard Zadok Allen gives the town’s history in a long monologue in dialect, sustained and controlled, and the pursuit through the town is long withheld and suddenly released. At the end the narrator discovers his own descent from the Deep Ones, and the particular becomes archetype: the old pattern of the blood that calls and the return to the sea, which he chooses at the close, “amidst wonder and glory for ever”. Here, for once, a person carries the pattern.
The same tale discloses a second thing, despite itself. The fear of descent and degeneration, of the blood and the stranger, in Innsmouth, in “Arthur Jermyn” and in “Red Hook”, reveals a white New England dread as plainly as any document of the period. It is disclosed by the tales rather than understood by their author, and a symptom is a weaker disclosure than a finding. Elsewhere the particulars are thin: the people are functions of the myth, love and marriage barely exist, “The Thing on the Doorstep” the near exception, women are almost wholly absent, and society is crowd or mob.
Movement V
The reach began in his lifetime, among the correspondents who wrote in his myth, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard, Robert Bloch and Frank Belknap Long, and with Derleth’s Arkham House, which made his survival. The critics of the 1940s dismissed the tales, Edmund Wilson most famously. The writers did not. Stephen King has named him as a source, in “Jerusalem’s Lot” and “Crouch End”; Ramsey Campbell, T. E. D. Klein, Thomas Ligotti and Caitlín R. Kiernan followed, and then the New Weird of China Miéville and Jeff VanderMeer. Borges dedicated “There Are More Things” to his memory, in El libro de arena (1975). Victor LaValle answered him in The Ballad of Black Tom (2016) and Matt Ruff in Lovecraft Country (2016). Into the main line of the novel the reach is slight, and much of it was delayed.
The body has sustained ninety years of serious reading: S. T. Joshi’s scholarship, Michel Houellebecq’s essay of 1991, the philosophers of “weird realism” who read it as an ontology, and the critique of its racial fear, now a field of its own. It is reread as myth, as philosophy and as symptom. Yet the tales yield less on return than the literature around them. The withheld revelation, once known, is known; the sentences do not open on rereading; the people have no interior to return to. What renews is the cosmology, the questions it raises, and the record of an age’s fear.
The tales are now ninety to a hundred years old. Their passage into the academy and the major series came late, Penguin Classics from 1999 and the Library of America in 2005, after long confinement to the pulps and the genre press; they are now continuously in print and translated into many languages, and on other desks the myth runs on in film, in John Carpenter’s The Thing and the design of Alien, and in the role-playing game Call of Cthulhu (1981). Fame and the myth’s commercial life are presence, not proof. The racial fear and the pulp manner fix the surface to its moment. What has outlived both is the finding of the first sentence of “Cthulhu”, and the island it names, placid, in the midst of black seas.
Act III · The Twelve
Within the best tales the subtractive test finds little. “The Colour Out of Space” moves from the meteorite to the blighted farm to the well without a scene to spare, and “The Call of Cthulhu” is three documents, each required for the correlation its first sentence fears. Across the body, and inside the long tales, the test bites hard. At the Mountains of Madness gives several of its twelve parts to a reading of the Old Ones’ history from the bas-reliefs; “The Whisperer in Darkness” spends much of its length on letters that tell the reader what the ending will confirm. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the template: a scholar, a document, a resistance, and a disclosure the reader has foreseen, delivered as though unforeseen. Many tales could go and the body would know the same things.
Score: 7.2 / 10
The finding can be stated, and Lovecraft states it: the cosmos is indifferent to man, human history is an episode in a deep time that dwarfs it, and knowledge of this is not a liberation but a harm. “The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.” After Darwin, Lyell and the new astronomy that is a true condition, and the tales make it felt rather than argued. A second disclosure comes despite the author: the dread of descent and degeneration, of the blood and the stranger, in Innsmouth, “Arthur Jermyn” and “Red Hook”; it is a symptom, which discloses less than a finding. Held below 8.0 because one finding is repeated, much of the yield is mood, and love, labour and society are scarcely examined.
Score: 7.9 / 10
The elevation is frequent and of one kind: the dreadful sublime of scale, cold and vast. The Antarctic city of At the Mountains of Madness, seen from the air above the plateau, and the descent through it to the shoggoth’s piping, “Tekeli-li!”; R’lyeh risen, its geometry wrong, a door that opens at an angle the sailors cannot hold in mind; the farm at the end of “Colour”, the trees glowing and the colour going back up into the sky; the narrator of “The Shadow Out of Time” finding a manuscript in his own hand, written millions of years before. Few writers in English of the century rise to the cosmic so often. Held below the top because the heights are often announced, “unnamable” and “blasphemous” standing where the sentence should show, and there is no warm elevation anywhere.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Here the myth is built, not evoked, and it is the body’s strongest claim. Over a decade of tales Lovecraft made a cosmology: its gods, Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth, Azathoth and Nyarlathotep; its forbidden book, the Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred; its sacred geography, Arkham, Miskatonic University, Innsmouth, Dunwich and Kingsport; and its liturgy, “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn”. The myth is load-bearing: each tale means by its place in it, and it became a common myth that others built in. In Innsmouth the particular takes archetypal weight, the blood that calls and the return to the sea. Held at 8.6 because the particulars are thin: the people are functions, and the archetype too often stands without a person to carry it.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The inheritance is plain, and Lovecraft named it himself in Supernatural Horror in Literature: Poe above all, Machen’s “The Great God Pan”, Blackwood’s “The Willows”, Dunsany’s invented pantheon, and the Gothic of ghost, curse and sin. The turn is real. He took horror from the supernatural to the materialist, from ghost and devil to beings from outside space and time, indifferent rather than malign, and from a moral universe in which horror punishes sin to one in which horror is merely what is true; he married the weird tale to the scientific report and gave it deep time. The stake was paid in full: the pulps, rejection by the publishers he respected, death in poverty at forty-six. Held below 8.5 because Machen and Blackwood had already reached for the outer and the impersonal, and the form he kept was a proven path.
Score: 8.3 / 10
In the best tales the form is the instrument of the knowledge. “The Call of Cthulhu” enacts its first sentence: the narrator correlates a sculptor’s dream, a police inspector’s raid on a cult and a sailor’s log, and the correlation is the horror. Told as one straight narrative, the tale would lose its finding, that knowledge itself is the danger. At the Mountains of Madness is a report written to stop an expedition, so that its form is a warning; “The Shadow Out of Time” turns on the document found at the end. The narrator who resists what he knows makes the reader do the knowing. Held at 8.0 because across the body the form hardens into formula, and the italicised last line, “it was a photograph from life” in “Pickman’s Model”, is often a mechanism rather than the form thinking.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The evidence is ninety years long and wide: S. T. Joshi’s scholarship; Michel Houellebecq’s essay of 1991; the philosophers of “weird realism”, who have read the body as an ontology; and the critique of its racial fear, which has become a field of its own. The tales are reread as myth, as philosophy and as symptom. But they yield less on return than the literature around them. Their mechanism is the withheld revelation, and once known it is known; their sentences do not open on rereading as Poe’s best do; their people have no interior to return to. What renews is the cosmology and the questions it raises, and the record of an age’s fear: much of the return is to the myth and to the case of Lovecraft rather than to particular pages.
Score: 7.8 / 10
The field is fiction in English of the twentieth century, and within it the tale of terror. The intrinsic force is high: the body reorganised what horror could be about, moving it from sin and the supernatural to the cosmic and the indifferent, and it invented a shared and open myth that other writers could enter. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in his lifetime the correspondents who wrote in his myth, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard, Robert Bloch and Frank Belknap Long; then Stephen King, Ramsey Campbell, T. E. D. Klein, Thomas Ligotti, Caitlín R. Kiernan and the New Weird of China Miéville and Jeff VanderMeer; Borges, who dedicated “There Are More Things” to his memory; the answering novels of Victor LaValle and Matt Ruff. Held at the bar because reach into the main line of the novel is slight, and much of it was delayed and owes to Derleth.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, over about ninety to a hundred years. Form: the tales survive whole, but the texts were long corrupt, in the pulps and in Derleth’s editions, and were corrected only in the 1980s; that is charged a little. Presence was long confined to the pulps and the genre press, and the critics of the 1940s dismissed it, Edmund Wilson most famously; its passage into the academy and the major series, Penguin Classics from 1999 and the Library of America in 2005, came late. Now it is very wide: continuously in print, translated into many languages. Fame and the myth’s commercial life are presence, not proof, and earn at most a tenth. The racial fear and the pulp manner fix the surface to its moment, and are charged. The figure sits at the foot of the usual range.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Judged on Lovecraft’s English. The structural craft is real and at its best load-bearing: the escalation of “Colour”, the documentary assembly of “Cthulhu”, the long withholding and sudden release of the pursuit through Innsmouth, and the pseudo-scholarship that makes the invented sound read. The dialect monologue of the old drunkard Zadok Allen is a sustained, controlled piece of voice. Against that the charges are heavy and fall on most of the body. The prose is adjective-laden and repetitive, “eldritch”, “cyclopean”, “blasphemous” and “loathsome” recurring from tale to tale; it tells the reader what to feel at the moment it should show; dialogue outside dialect is stiff; the characters are scarcely made; endings are signalled pages ahead. The archaic manner is chosen and at times serves, but not as often as it is used.
Score: 7.4 / 10
One physics governs the body: the cosmos is indifferent and vast, man is late and small in it, and knowledge of the true order destroys the knower or transforms him. Take the two most distant elements: the backwoods New England farm of “The Colour Out of Space”, with its well, its rotting fruit and its neighbours’ talk, and the Great Race of “The Shadow Out of Time”, minds migrating across millions of years. They obey the same law. The farm is undone by a thing from outside that has no malice and no meaning for it; the Great Race shows humanity as a brief tenant. The local and the cosmic are one scale read at two magnifications. Held at 8.2 because the range, wide in space and time, is narrow in tone: one register, one sort of man, and the law never tested against love, society or comedy.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Judged on what a body of tales can hold, and it holds more than most: deep time and the cosmos; the sciences of its day, geology, biology, mathematics and physics, as orders of reality; the history and topography of New England, its decayed towns and old families; heredity, the family as inheritance; the sacred, inverted, as cult and outer gods; the mind breaking under knowledge. The one law integrates them. What holds the axis: the state, labour and the economy appear only as a decayed fishing town’s trade or a university’s expedition; love and marriage barely exist, “The Thing on the Doorstep” the near exception; women are almost wholly absent; society is crowd or mob. The orders held are vast in scale and few in kind.
Score: 7.4 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.1 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.0, then The Archetypal Deep at 8.6, Pressure on Tradition at 8.5 and The Sublime at 8.4. Tales now ninety to a hundred years in the world, long corrupt and long dismissed, and now continuously in print, in many languages and in the major series; a cosmology built across a decade, with its gods, its book, its geography and its liturgy, load-bearing in every tale and open to every writer who came after; a reorganisation of what horror could be about, from sin and the supernatural to the cosmic and the indifferent, whose reach runs from his own correspondents to King, Ligotti, Borges and the New Weird; and a dreadful sublime of scale that rises again and again.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 7.2: tales that are tight at their best, in “Colour” and “Cthulhu”, set in a body that repeats one template, a scholar, a document, a resistance, a disclosure foreseen, and in long tales that spend whole parts on exposition the story has already earned; many tales could go and the body would know the same things. Next above it, The Made and The Encompassed at 7.4: structural craft that carries the major tales, in prose adjective-laden, repetitive and telling where it should show, with characters scarcely made; and orders vast in scale and few in kind, with the state, labour, love and women nearly absent.
The Necessity Cap is unmet: The Inevitable at 7.2 falls three tenths short of the threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Inner Law at 8.2, The Living Form at 8.0, The Made at 7.4, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 9.0 and The Archetypal Deep at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, and Pressure on Tradition meets it exactly at 8.5, but The Swerve at 8.3 and The Unconcealment at 7.9 fall short of it. The Universal Minimum is unmet at The Inevitable, 7.2, and The Made, 7.4, both below 7.5; The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.4. Two of the five summit conditions are met, the Coherence Floor and the Megethos Floor. The work stands where its aggregate places it: 8.1, in the band of Tier IV, and the Necessity Cap would close the summit to it at any aggregate.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the weird tales of H. P. Lovecraft, who died in 1937, from “Dagon” (written 1917) to “The Haunter of the Dark” (1935), first printed mostly in Weird Tales and other pulps from 1919, several only after his death; scored on the corrected texts that date from S. T. Joshi’s work in the 1980s, the pulp printings and Derleth’s editions having long carried editors’ alterations and errors. The unit scored is the body of weird tales of his maturity as it is now read; Lovecraft made no collection of them, and saw only The Shadow over Innsmouth (Visionary Publishing, 1936) as a book in his lifetime. The Dunsanian dream tales, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath among them, the poems, the revisions ghost-written for clients and the letters are outside the unit; Supernatural Horror in Literature is named only where it bears on the tales. The tales weighed most are “The Call of Cthulhu”, “The Colour Out of Space”, “The Shadow over Innsmouth”, At the Mountains of Madness, “The Shadow Out of Time”, “The Rats in the Walls”, “The Dunwich Horror” and “The Whisperer in Darkness”, and after them “The Music of Erich Zann”, “The Outsider”, “Pickman’s Model”, “The Dreams in the Witch House”, “The Thing on the Doorstep”, “The Haunter of the Dark” and The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. Scored in Lovecraft’s English. No text was in hand; nothing was measured by script, and no quotation was checked against a file. The tales are quoted only where their words are certain, and briefly; everything else is paraphrased, and passages are cited by tale. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them the lengths of the tales in words, the edition read and its editor, and the dates of Joshi’s corrected volumes.