H. P. Lovecraft
H. P. Lovecraft
Howard Phillips Lovecraftwas an American author who achieved posthumous fame through his influential works of horror fiction. Virtually unknown and only published in pulp magazines before he died in poverty, he is now regarded as one of the most significant 20th-century authors in his genre. Lovecraft was born in Providence, Rhode Island, where he spent most of his life. Among his most celebrated tales is "The Call of Cthulhu", canonical to the Cthulhu Mythos. Never able to support himself from...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth20 August 1890
CityProvidence, RI
CountryUnited States of America
It must be remembered that there is no real reason to expect anything in particular from mankind; good and evil are local expedients--or their lack--and not in any sense cosmic truths or laws.
There are black zones of shadow close to our daily paths, and now and then some evil soul breaks a passage through. When that happens, the man who knows must strike before reckoning the consequences.
Uncertainty and danger are always closely allied, thus making any kind of an unknown world a world of peril and evil possibilities.
I could not help feeling that they were evil things-- mountains of madness whose farther slopes looked out over some accursed ultimate abyss. That seething , half-luminous cloud-background held ineffable suggestions of a vague, ethereal beyondness far more than terrestrially spatial; and gave appalling reminders of the utter remoteness, separateness, desolation, and aeon-long death of this untrodden and unfathomed austral world.
There are horrors beyond life's edge that we do not suspect, and once in a while man's evil prying calls them just within our range.
All my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large.
If we were sensible we would seek death--the same blissful blank which we enjoyed before we existed.
Ultimate horror often paralyses memory in a merciful way.
So far as English versification is concerned, Pope was the world, and all the world was Pope.
No amount of rationalisation, reform, or Freudian analysis can quite annul the thrill of the chimney-corner whisper or the lonely wood.
It is only the inferior thinker who hastens to explain the singular and the complex by the primitive shortcut of supernaturalism.
Rome was so mighty that it could not fall. It had to vanish in a cloud, like so many of the mythical heros of antiquity, and to receive its apotheosis among the stars before men became fully aware that it had vanished from the earth!
In my actual imaginative contact with life, I am vastly more responsive to beauty than to horror--indeed, I never experience real cosmic horror except in infrequent nightmares. However, when I come to record my various imaginative experiences, I generally find that only the horror items have any uniqueness or originality. Others have seen the same beautiful things that I have seen, & have sung them more nobly.
The end is near. I hear a noise at the door, as of some immense slippery body lumbering against it. It shall not find me. God, that hand! The window! The window!