H.P. Lovecraft: The Call of Cthulhu and Other Stories

 On the surface, it would be difficult to say why Lovecraft has commanded such an outsized influence over popular culture.  It is surely not his skill as a writer.  His prose is obscure, inconsistent, and needlessly precious.  His characterization?  Nonexistent.  Plot?  Pacing?  Almost amateurish.  He is often cited as a master of mood, but even if it were true--and I am not convinced on this point--it could scarcely be enough to account for his market share of the modern mind.  

The argument can easily be made that his philosophy matches the current moment.  What difference is there, practically speaking, between a crumbling, cruel, and ravenous world and the awakening of a ancient god?  The only natural response to either is overpowering dread.  This dread has become a hallmark of the current generation, and Lovecraft is a natural fit.  However, his influence is not sudden and recent.  It is more accurate to say that decades of influence have positioned him perfectly to speak to the current moment, and one returns to the question, "What is responsible for those decades of influence?"

If the discussion is limited to literary talent, then there is no good answer.  To understand Lovecraft, it is necessary to stop viewing him as a writer at all.  He is not, in reality, an author of fiction at all.  He is a cultural anthropologist, whose chosen subject happens to be fictional.  He is not, in this sense, to be compared to other writers with whom he shared an era: Conan Doyle, for example.  He is rather analogous to the Doyle scholar Leslie Klinger, who immersed himself in the "gentle fiction" Of Doyle's world, and made it real.  

What Klinger does for Doyle (and others), Lovecraft does for an entire dream world that exists in the human subconscious.  He takes the works of his lesser known peers (Blackwood, Machen, etc.) and sees how they are not isolated expressions of creative minds.  They are, rather part of a collective world that exists just under the surface of consciousness and in the corners of waking vision.  He then integrates them with his own half-dreaming glimpses of that world, and reveals and analyzes it with an almost scholarly attention to detail.  He even goes so far as to pin it to the greater reality in certain key places.  He does this partly with both with geographical plausibility, creating places that may well exist and mingling them with places that actually do.  In this way, he creates something like a prototypical Kcymaerxthaere, a world that is pinned to our reality, but just slightly out of phase with it. The most effective tethers to what we may perceive as reality, however, are figures like Robert Olmstead who see more of the shadows, and whisper to the reader, "What you see in the corners of your room are also real."  This is, for lack of a better explanation, what gives him such inroads into our minds.  He is not the entertainer who creates a fanciful world for us to enjoy; he is the reassuring, terrifying voice of a stranger who says, "I see it too."