Lovecraftian Horror and How to Write It · 5:52am May 21st, 2015
So, as some of you might have noticed based on my stories, I have a huge soft-spot for Lovecraftian Horror. The first story I ever wrote that even had a trace of quality to it was some college short story that was pretty much a straight homage to Lovecraft, and my very first story on this site had borrowed heavily from Lovecraftian elements (there's an evil book and a horror from beyond space and time). You can even find echoes of his themes in my works that don't have direct ties to his themes. The Royal Ponyville Orchestra and Princess Luna's Academy both focus heavily on a narrator's slow descent into madness, and while he didn't invent that idea, it did feature prominently in his works, and more importantly, his work was where I was first exposed to the idea. Obviously, I'm not about to argue that RPO and PLA are Lovecraft-inspired stories, I'm just trying to illustrate the massive amount of influence he's had on my work (and to be fair, a lot of the madness in RPO and PLA is more therapy than homage, and I could pretty easily point out which of Octavia and Sweetie's neurosis were stolen from me).
I greedily devour Lovecraftian horror. If I see a game or a movie that has even the faintest smack of Lovecraft to it, it'll probably be purchased within the fortnight. I'll stay up all night reading books that add to or play with his ideas, and when the mood strikes me, I'll borrow his ideas and themes and weave them into my own story. I don't claim to be an expert on a lot of things, and I won't even say I'm an expert on Lovecraft (hell, there might be a few stories of his I haven't read yet), but I do know enough about the topic to write a very ill-advised blog post on the subject that does its best to explain Lovecraft's themes and discuss some of the more common pitfalls I see writers fall into (and some of these are actual professional writers. Writers whose work I paid money to read).
First of all, what are these dammed Lovecraftian elements I've rambled on about so much? Well, instead of me doing a piss-poor job of summing up the man's ideas, let's let Lovecraft do the job for us with his opening lines for Call of Cthulhu:
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 the infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.
In an age where mankind was discovering just how enormously mind-numbingly huge and strange the world around us was, Lovecraft wrote to fill that universe with horror. The same decade The Call of Cthulhu was published, scientists were debating the existence of other galaxies, and as our universe became bigger, our place in it suddenly became a lot smaller. This revelation of complete and utter insignificance and the horror and madness it brings is key to Lovecraft's works. Humanity isn't doomed because vast and powerful forces are arrayed against us; we're doomed because vast and powerful forces might accidentally step on us. The things that surround us are so vast and alien that to even glimpse them is to court madness and understanding them is a madness of the highest order.
Unfortunately, there's another way Lovecraft's works were inspired by his time, and this one is just as key to understanding his work as the other, even if it's far less agreeable: Racism. Lovecraft was an unapologetic racist. Some people might try to defend this accusation by saying everyone was racist back then or that his racism doesn't impact your enjoyment of his work. First, even for his time, he was racist. The closest he came to writing a sympathetic black character was when he named one of his character's cats N****r Man (The name, by the way, came from the name of one of his favorite cats). And second of all, he didn't keep that racism isolated from his writing. Those ideas were... important to him, and so they came across in his work. Non-white races are depicted as degenerate others in league with the forces beyond our comprehension, and the fear of miscegenation (racial interbreeding) is a major fear in his works; The Dunwich Horror starts off with the narrator talking about the degeneracy of the backwoods people, and the whole plot is about racial inbreeding. His racism and fear of the other are interwoven together, so one of the key components of Lovecraftian Horror is based in part a racist worldview.
Now, here's the tricky part: that doesn't make his work bad, and you can enjoy his work for what it is without being a racist. Just recognize that it's there and that being terrified of aliens that are so... well... alien that their very visage brings madness doesn't also mean you're terrified of the dilution of the white race (unless you're terrified that the white race is being diluted by fish people. Then carry on). It's complicated and there's occasionally going to be moments where the narrator in your brain has to take a moment to acknowledge how terribly racist something was, but if you can translate his fears to be fears for the whole of humanity and unlink the racial element from his description of degenerated humans, then you can probably do alright for yourself. However, if you can't get past that racial component of his work, that's totally understandable, and there's plenty of Lovecraft-inspired horror that isn't racist, so the subgenre isn't closed to you because of the failings of its creator.
So, to sum up: Lovecraftian Horror separates himself from other types of horror because of how completely impersonal it is. Nothing's haunting us, we're just have a delusional sense of our own importance in the cosmos, and when those delusions are broken, things go bad and we tend to mad (there's something there about learning the truth being a cause rather than a cure for madness in Lovecraftian works). That which is outside our little island of ignorance is terrifying and something we were never meant to know.
Now that the boring explain-ey stuff is out of the way, let's get to how you should write Lovecraftian horror, or more accurately, how Distaff Pope thinks you should write Lovecraftian horror.
First of all, it's important to determine how involved you want the Cthulhu mythos to be in your story. Personally, I prefer trying to keep my own little cosmology in my horror stories because I like the freedom it grants me and I really feel the idea of a terrifyingly alien and incomprehensible universe is undercut somewhat when the reader already has a pretty solid grasp of it at the outset. If the narrator is piecing together some terrible truth, but the reader is rolling his eyes and saying "It's Cthulhu" then maybe something's gone wrong somewhere, and the quickest fix is throwing the reader into a cosmology as alien to them as it is to the narrator. Hell, I'm of the opinion that CoC campaigns work best when the players don't even know they're in a CoC campaign until a few sessions in.
Obviously, you can't have that level of surprise with a reader, otherwise they'd never pick up the book (maybe... if I knew more about game design, I'd love to write a Phoenix Wright-style investigation game that morphs into Lovecraftian Horror a few cases in), but you can still try to offer some surprises. In a genre so heavily dominated by fear of the unknown, rehashing the same monsters seems like an anathema.
However, there are still going to be people who really want to write in the Cthulhu mythos. Who want to write about Miskatonic University and Arkham and Dunwich and Cthulhu and all the other environs they know and love. Obviously, considering the forum I'm writing this on and my own body of work, it would be massively hypocritical of me to say you can't, so instead let's look at what makes for good fanfiction and then apply it to the Cthulhu mythos.
Would you read a fanfic where a swarm of insects is devouring Ponyville and the mane six have to save the day? Probably not, because unless there are some major changes made to the plot, it's going to read a lot like "Swarm of the Century," and we already watched that episode. Now, a skilled and deft writer could reinvent things, move the central message away from "You should always listen to your friends" and change it into something novel, and probably wind up writing a decent story, but without those major changes, no one's going to want to read a story that's basically just an episode of the show.
But if you want to write Lovecraftian Horror and work in the mythos, you can't change the themes to heavily. If the cult summons Cthulhu and it's a huge anti-climax because the modern world's already desensitized everyone to unspeakable horror, then it's not Lovecraftian Horror. If the cult summons Cthulhu and he's immediately blasted to hell by a couple of battleships, then it's not Lovecraftian Horror.
How then, can you write Lovecraftian horror while still working with the mythos? The easiest solution is to change the setting. Instead of plopping us down in 1928 New England, plop us down in 2928 New New New England. The reader's now on unfamiliar territory and will be guessing just where the horror is as the story unfolds. How much better would it be to translate Lovecraft's fear of the other to an alien world colonists are trying and failing to make their home? Better yet, can you imagine what might happen when the first explorers encounter Azathoth dancing blindly in the very heart of creation? I'm not saying these are good ideas, but they're different. They take the Lovecraftian reader at least a little bit out of their comfort zone, and that's the first step to writing good horror, I think.
But let's say you really really want to write Lovecraftian horror set in 1930s America. Maybe you even want to namedrop or mention some of his characters (a vast majority of his work is public domain now, so you could write and publish a story about Cthulhu and Nylarthotep and Henry Armitage having ball-slappingly good sex without worrying about a lawsuit from his estate. Why you'd want to do that, I have no idea). How can you write that story without coming across as derivative? I can't offer you a list of things to do, but I can offer you a list of things not to do.
1.) Don't make major additions to the mythos. Is that hypocritical? I just argued that you should generally avoid the mythos, and now I'm arguing that if you must use the mythos not to make major changes to it? Well, I think there's a reason for it. Again, imagine you're reading an MLP fanfic, and all of a sudden another alicorn appears who's totally as powerful as Celestia and plays a similar role in the story to Celestia. Readers are going to know this character is basically Celestia, they're going to wonder why you didn't just use her, and they're going to see it as either a hastily-cribbed self-insert that's being given undue importance in the lore or they'll see it as an insult to their intelligence. The same rule applies with the Cthulhu mythos. Instead of doing that, maybe comb through Lovecraft's works for a reference to something arcane and terrifying that's never fully explained and flesh that out if you want to add something to the mythos. We're way cooler with writing about background characters doing stuff than we are with OCs because they at least have some basis in the canon.
2.) DON'T touch cults or Cthulhu. If it starts with a "C" in the Lovecraft mythos, then it's probably played out, and the reader's going to know exactly where the story's going. No joke, I read a book -- a real, paid for with actual money book -- that ended with the protagonist going to a freshly rearisen Rl'yeh to stop a dude from casting a spell that would awaken Cthulhu. Actually, that's the whole reason I wrote this massive blog post at midnight instead of doing something infinitely more sensible like getting some dammed sleep. It just absolutely irritated me that a book written in 21st century would have a climax that was so derivative of Lovecraft's best known work. (Of course, I still plan on finishing the book and purchasing the sequel. Have I mentioned I'm an absolute glutton for Lovecraftian Horror? My appetite for it is insatiable.) There is a lot more to the Cthulhu mythos than just Cthulhu, the Necronomicon, and nameless cults. Maybe write a story about Nylarthotep poisoning the Dreamlands to try and draw the world into madness or literally anything that isn't just a giant retread of Lovecraft's best known work.
Yes, it might be fun and people like me who are addicted to the mythos will probably buy it anyways, but there's so much in the Cthulhu mythos that isn't explained, gods that are only hinted at, alien vistas unimagined and unimaginable. Go wild and feel free to reinvent things as you see fit, because in a world so focused on an unknowable and ever-changing cosmos, sticking to the established and safe conventions is probably the worst insult to Lovecraft's ideas imaginable.
PS: I've written chapter 11 of WTPV and will probably be editing it soon. That is not dead which can eternal lie and such...
3084798 Now, see, I fear I messed something up terribly, because as the CoC quote might imply, in Lovecraft's world, ignorance was way preferable to knowledge. His stories tend to end with the protagonist gaining some secret knowledge that, if they're luck, just drives them insane. The core fear of Lovecraft isn't the unknown, it's the fear of looking up,at the night sky, seeing entire galaxies, and understanding how deeply insignificant and meaningless all of mankind's accomplishments are. It's the knowing that every principle you believe in is a made up idea that the rest of the universe doesn't acknowledge. That's why his monsters are so big and alien, to drive home the bigness and strangeness of the universe outside our island of ignorance.
As for the other thing, I haven't listened to Night Vale since November. I kind of binge on shows and then avoid them while the backlog builds up for the next binge. I understand the move to character stuff, though. By taking the focus off the weird and onto the characters, it allows for more nuanced plots and conserves the weird for spice. If the focus stayed on the weird, jokes would start to get stale. This keeps the show fresh longer.
I think the key to good Lovecraft horror is that the feeling is something right on the edge of your sight. You know something is there but you can't quite see it.
Movie you may (or may not) realize was Lovecraftian: CHUD was based on "Pickman's Model". It's not as obvious as it could be because the producers trumped the director and insisted the monsters be made over the top creature features instead of inbred cannibal hobos. Inbred canibal mole people, because not all Lovecraftian horror is on a cosmic scale.