This article originally appeared in issue 4 of Death Ray magazine.

Since his untimely death H. P. Lovecraft’s work has achieved classic status. Largely credited with pulling Lovecraft from obscurity and ensuring that legacy is his friend and contemporary, August Derleth. But Derleth’s stewardship of the so-called Cthulhu mythos was just the beginning of a misrepresentation and misunderstanding of Lovecraft’s ideas that continues to this day.

‘The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.’

- H. P. Lovecraft

An introduction to H. P. Lovecraft is a pivotal moment for many fans of the speculative and fantastical. Lacking the mainstream popularity of Stephen King, Star Trek, Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings and their ilk, (all of which often provide a very first glimpse into the imaginative realms), Lovecraft is a discovery that awaits those already inclined to dig a little deeper, often providing a first foray into the genre proper. His is a destination reached often indirectly, via the books, comics and roleplaying games inspired by his stories, on the basis of a friend’s recommendation or a name-check by the more prominent likes of Neil Gaiman, Joss Whedon or Sam Raimi. Indeed, for many, a first meeting with Lovecraft may be the result of nothing more than a simple accidental unearthing.

This obscurity is not a solely posthumous trait. In Lovecraft’s own lifetime his readership was even more limited, a fact to which Lovecraft was seemingly resigned, commenting that: ‘The appeal of the spectrally macabre is generally narrow because it demands from the reader a certain degree of imagination and a capacity for detachment from every-day life.’

Following his death in 1937, a publishing company, Arkham House, was founded to keep Lovecraft’s work in print, enthusiastically shepherded by his friend and contemporary, August Derleth. It is largely from these efforts that Lovecraft’s modern popularity stems, and without Arkham’s 1939 publication of The Outsider and Others, a collection of Lovecraft short stories, the author may very well have remained in complete obscurity.

Derleth’s involvement, however, was not entirely a blessing. In Lovecraft’s own lifetime, the so-called Lovecraft Circle – which included such notables as Clark Ashton Smith and Robert E. Howard – would frequently allude to Lovecraft’s creations in their own stories, but these allusions were just that, nods and winks, in all likelihood included for the mutual amusement of all concerned and no more. To Derleth, however, such references were canon, any story referencing them was treated as such, and thus the vast Cthulhu mythos was born, encapsulating Lovecraft’s own work and that of many others which Derleth perceived to be somehow connected to it, no matter how tangentially.

This close alignment of Lovecraft’s own work with that of his close friends and contemporaries is perhaps in itself no disservice to the man, but what followed was a great raft of stories inspired by Lovecraft which were, in truth, vastly inferior. Derleth’s broad canon inevitably had the effect on encircling many, if not all, of these within the mythos, a trend which continued to dilute the original vision and reduce it to the level of stock horror. Perhaps most indicative of this is the (incredibly popular) Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game, several early editions of which boasted in their introduction that:

‘If you have never read Lovecraft, but you like horror stories, Call of Cthulhu opens a new vista of role-playing for you. Vampires, werewolves, ghosts, zombies…all await within.’

Well, actually, in Lovecraft, they don’t. All these things are bogeymen. Things that go bump in the night. Things that chase lone women down dark alleys, or sneak up on unsuspecting travellers, suck out their blood and eat their brains. Lovecraft’s monstrosities are much scarier than that. As Lovecraft himself said in his lengthy essay, Supernatural Horror in Literature:

‘The true weird tale has something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule. A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present, and there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its subject, of that most terrible conception of the human brain — a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space.’

‘secret murder, bloody bones,’ and ‘a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule’ are, sadly, all too common in many of the stories which would later populate the mythos Lovecraft was broadly seen to have begun.

Faced with such a vast body of work as he now was, Derleth found himself compelled to define and categorise it. This he did, creating, amongst other things, the elemental system which constrained each creature of the mythos to one of the classical categories of earth, air, fire and water. A convenient system for Derleth and others, perhaps, but one which had the effect of burying Lovecraft’s work in needlessly rigid and ordered categories, entirely unrepresentative of the man’s own writing (perplexingly defining Cthulhu – a creature held prisoner beneath the waves – as a water elemental, for example). According to Derleth, a higher cosmology was also apparent in Lovecraft’s work:

‘As Lovecraft conceived the deities or forces of his mythos, there were, initially, the Elder Gods … benign deities, representing the forces of good [and] the powers of evil … variously known as the Great Old Ones or the Ancient Ones…’

In fact, the idea of a unified pantheon in Lovecraft’s work is ridiculous. The various forces described – Elder Gods, Great Old Ones, Ancient Ones – appear across numerous stories in guises so different as to be seemingly unrelated and, while the Great Old Ones of Lovecraft’s later work undoubtedly were intended by him to resemble something akin to an organised pantheon, the Ancient Ones are mentioned in only one story, Through the Gates of the Silver Key, and would seem to have nothing to identify them as connected in any way with Cthulhu, Azathoth or all the rest of them. Lovecraft’s great skill was the simple ease with which he alluded to seemingly vast and ancient pantheons without ever prescribing them in the kind of minute detail which Derleth seemed to imagine existed and which, in truth, only serves to lessen the immediate horror of their mere suggestion.

There is perhaps one obvious reason for Derleth’s insistence on organising Lovecraft’s work in this manner. Derleth was a devout Roman Catholic, a man who was in many ways a cliché of the wholesome American boy-scout image. A recurring theme of Lovecraft’s work is the absence of morality, and the sad, pathetic light in which this casts all of humankind’s supposedly lofty wisdom, but for Derleth this was perhaps too deeply unsettling, and he instead resorted to the simplistic, black-and-white reassurances of a universe of good and evil. Such a reading does little justice to the concepts embodied by Chthulhu, Yog-Sothoth and the like, tucking them safely away amongst the forbidden and the taboo, where properly these things belong in the realm of the undeniable and the unbearable both. With it comes also the implication that ‘evil’ can be defeated – as the dominant religions of the Western World (and much of the East) have been telling us for several thousand years now – a notion rejected utterly by Lovecraft but embraced wholeheartedly by the staunchly Christian Derleth and others. That later authors take comfort in such a sanitised view is undoubtedly testament to the stark horror of Lovecraft’s own dark vision.

Brian Lumley, an author whose earliest contributions to the mythos occurred under Derleth’s own guidance, continues the trend of good versus evil in his long-running Necroscope series and, most tellingly, in his Titus Crow stories, the titular character being a kind of Lovecraftian witch-hunter on a mission to root out Cthulhu’s minions no matter where they might hide. ‘…the main difference between my stories …and HPL’s…’ Lumley says is that ‘…my guys fight back…’. Born in the North-East and having spent much of his adult life in the military, Lumley himself is no doubt accustomed to fighting back, but the suggestion that someone, even a Geordie, might somehow fight back against the nuclear chaos at the centre of the universe is, frankly, a bit silly.

In the end, this is the great shame of the whole business, that out of nothing more than a genuine respect and adoration for Lovecraft’s work, so many have added to it with stories that not only contradict, but also confuse and constrain the startling concepts whose imagining was Lovecraft’s real triumph.

Perhaps such blanket criticism is harsh – as Lovecraft himself said: ‘Creative minds are uneven, and the best of fabrics have their dull spots.’ – but regardless, for new and old readers alike there is a benefit to be had by separating Lovecraft from his successors. For those who began with Lovecraft but strayed all too easily into the midst of the great mire of mythos that now surrounds him, returning to see him once more alone and in isolation will surely be a reminder of his unique skill. For those yet to read Lovecraft, perhaps having been deterred or too easily seduced by the bland imitators along the way, take a first look. Readers of both kinds may well be surprised – nay, horrified – at what they find.