I had the good fortune to receive this unusual book from a fellow Lovecraft fan, who assured me I would like it. My friend was right. Written in an accessible style by a philosophy professor, this is the best scholarly work about H.P. Lovecraft, the great 20th-century American horror author, I’ve read since Bobby Derie’s learned study, Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos. While Harman starts out by relating Lovecraft to certain philosophical traditions of which I’m utterly ignorant, he spends most of the text closely examining the way Lovecraft uses language. In effect, Harman rebuts those who have dismissed Lovecraft as a bad writer, from Edmund Wilson to John Connolly (a mystery author who calls himself a “Lovecraft agnostic” in the survey of his tastes in supernatural literature that closes his excellent forthcoming story collection, Night Music).
As part of his argument, Harman paraphrases passages from the fiction, like this line from “The Call of Cthulhu”: “the police could not but realize that they had stumbled on a dark cult totally unknown to them, and infinitely more diabolic than even the blackest of the African voodoo cults”—which becomes: “If you think the African voodoo circles are bad, let me tell you this: the cult that the police found in the swamp was infinitely worse.” Put into ordinary prose, Lovecraft is reduced to banality. Somewhat to my surprise, Harman doesn’t care for the extended sections in “At the Mountains of Madness” and “The Shadow out of Time” detailing, respectively, the civilizations of the Old Ones and the Great Race, but he deserves credit for challenging the conventional view of these masterpieces. I for one will look forward to reading any future critical commentary of his on Lovecraft.
