Reading Lovecraft's horror in times of illness

I am not courageous. People tell me I am. This is either to console me, or because a situation like mine calls for some minimal courage that everyone must show under the circumstances.

In spite of that, I lack courage. These days, I am excessively fearful. Fearful of my own body. With every ache I wonder, is it cancer progression or merely middle age? A PET scan is coming up next month. This is good: it will help my doctors to get a sense of how I am doing, and to decide on adjusting treatment if needed. But to me, the scan feels like I have a trial coming up, with the death penalty as one of the potential outcomes. The fear of scans is common in cancer patients. It is the fear of their own body defecting, or of something uncontrollable growing within. Such feelings are plainly irrational, because whatever the scan shows was already there, for months, just quietly lurking in the body, to be unveiled by the uncompromising look of science.

This state of constant fearfulness may be why I am enjoying H.P. Lovecraft's short horror fiction. His (anti)heroes, like Lovecraft himself, are afraid of everything. Afraid of mysterious music, of their bloodline being contaminated (Lovecraft was notoriously racist), even of air conditioning (!) The author came highly recommended by a friend, Eric Steinhart, who enjoys the cosmic horror element—the deep fathomless space, and deep time of which science can only give us imperfect and faint glimpses. I trace cosmic horror to at least the seventeenth century, where people such as Blaise Pascal pondered the implications that our universe is vast. A vast universe is indifferent to humans, maybe even actively hostile. “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me,” Pascal admitted.

Lovecraft imagines what such a vast, deep, universe is like, with gods and demons far more ancient than the Christian God (Lovecraft was an atheist). I enjoy reading how his fearful protagonists slowly come to this realization that the universe is far more terrible than we can know.

There's much to criticize in Lovecraft. He does incorporate science in his horror, but later authors did it better. His classism and racism are at times grating. Some tropes he used (notably, you wake up and it was all a dream, and he frequently calls things indescribable) you cannot do anymore.

But his prose is incredibly atmospheric and it gives you permission to lean into your deepest fears. It helps you to come to terms with the terrible thought that the universe is indifferent to your fate, and that science has its limits, and its price.

Here are some Lovecraft stories I recently read that I enjoyed. If you like audiobooks, they work very well in that format if the narrator is good, and you can find many good readings on Youtube for free (I link some as well)

The call of Cthulhu

(Story, Audiobook, published 1928). This story introduces the mythos of Cthulhu, Lovecraft's signature monster. This is a classic story of cosmic horror where old monsters lurk and may just decide to surface again, making us mad in the process. The story uses a very effective point of view. We read the notes of the deceased narrator, Francis Wayland Thurston, who goes through the estate of his deceased uncle, linguistics professor George Gammell Angell. We get introduced to Cthulhu's iconography as a monster that looks part human, dragon, octopus, on a small bass relief and reports of mass hysteria around the world.

The protagonist discovers writings of his uncle, who was driven mad, the protagonist is driven mad, will we, reading his notes, suffer the same fate? We are thus put in the position of Thurston. I love the opening paragraph of this story. It had me hooked, right away:

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

Cool Air

(Story, audiobook, published 1928) A story centering around fear of air conditioning (admittedly quite novel at the time) does not seem promising, but H.P. Lovecraft can make anything scary. The story begins thus—“You ask me to explain why I am afraid of a draught of cool air; why I shiver more than others upon entering a cold room, and seem nauseated and repelled when the chill of evening creeps through the heat of a mild autumn day.”

Our protagonist is a down-on-his-luck writer who looks for accommodation and finds it in a flat mostly inhabited by Hispanic people (cue terrible stereotypes, especially of the landlady, “a slatternly, almost bearded Spanish woman named Herrero”). His neighbor is the refined Dr Muñoz who needs his air conditioning always to be set at near-frigid constant temperature. Slowly, with the protagonist, we get to realize the amiable doctor's secret, which imaginatively expands on the idea that refrigeration can extend shelf life. Could it help you live forever? And what if the AC fails (cue Plantinga). A fascinating, beautiful story that fully displays Lovecraft's unease with ethnic diversity and the bustling life of New York City.

The Music of Erich Zann

(Story, Audiobook) My personal favorite of the Lovecraft stories I've read up until now. The protagonist is a student who lives in the Rue d’Auseil, a street he cannot find back anymore. One of the fellow boarders is a recluse old German viol player (Lovecraft means: cello, not violin), whose music reveals something from beyond the rules of our universe. The story is told in a restrained, quiet manner but has a lovely build up and the relationship between the old viol player and the student is touching.

The Color out of Space

If you want to read a very polished, beautifully crafted story, then I think Color out of Space (Story, Audiobook, 1927) is your pick. It was also Lovecraft's personal favorite. Set west in the hills of the fictional New English town of Arkham, there's an area known as the “blasted heath” where a color, never before observed by human eyes has descended, left by a meteorite. It poisons everything: the water, the livestock, the people…. Lovecraft succeeds in depicting an alien force that is completely devoid of any anthropomorphism. His characters, the rustic New English people, have depth. There's the skeptical farmer Nahum, on whose land the meteorite fell, and his friend Ammi Pierce.

The use of point of view is, like in Call of Cthulhu, effective: we begin with a land surveyor who comes to inspect the area for constructing a new reservoir, but then we get a story-in-the-story where he interviews Nahum's friend and we get Ammi's point of view. The story begins gentle and the tension builds up, culminating in an unforgettable scene where Ammi Pierce goes to check how Nahum's wife is doing, after she was locked up in the attic because she went insane.

The Strange High House in the Mist

Finally, the Strange High House in the Mist (Story, Audiobook, published 1931) features a philosopher as main character, Thomas Olney. He takes his family (wife and two children) to the town of Kingsport in Massachusetts, where a strange house on a cliff overlooks the city. Nobody has seen who lives there.

It seems difficult to imagine how the inhabitant, or inhabitants can go in or out given the crags are hard to scale. And yet, it's inhabited because the lights go on at night. Our philosopher decides to climb the cliffs and to see what's in the house. After the very atmospheric build up, almost anything that happens would be disappointing. But Lovecraft manages to retain the dream-like atmosphere until the end.