Old School Scary

"The barren, windswept interior of the Antarctic plateau was lifeless --or so the expedition from Miskatonic University thought..."

That's how he did it. He led us up to the door where the scary stuff was and then we had to put our own hand on the doorknob, turn it and slowly push open the creaking door to our own horror. H.P. Lovecraft didn't so much tell us about the horrific entities that filled his works, as much as let us tell ourselves about them.

The blurb introduces a book by the Providence, Rhode Island native. In At the Mountains of Madness (1939), the Miskatonic explorers of Antarctica descend by plane through `a horizontal stratum of ice-dust in the upper air' to behold an `almost endless labyrinth of colossal, regular, and geometrically eurythmic masses of stone', a `blasphemous city' spared from annihilation only by the `unhuman massiveness of these vast stone towers and ramparts.'

His descriptions, so grotesquely gigantic, are such that we have a hard time fitting it all in our imagination. That's how he wanted it, overwhelm us with enormous emotion and let us open the door.

According to an incredible Lovecraft site (http://www.hplovecraft.com) Howard Phillips Lovecraft was born at 9 a.m. on August 20, 1890, at his family home at 454 (then numbered 194) Angell Street in Providence, Rhode Island. His mother was Sarah Susan Phillips Lovecraft and his father was Winfield Scott Lovecraft, a traveling salesman for Gorham & Co., Silversmiths, of Providence.

When Lovecraft was three his father suffered a nervous breakdown in a hotel room in Chicago and was brought back to Butler Hospital, where he remained for five years before dying on July 19, 1898. Lovecraft was apparently informed that his father was paralyzed and comatose during this period, but the surviving evidence suggests that this was not the case; it is nearly certain that Lovecraft's father died of paresis, a form of neurosyphilis.

With the death of Lovecraft's father, the upbringing of the boy fell to his mother, his two aunts, and especially his grandfather, the prominent industrialist Whipple Van Buren Phillips. Lovecraft was a precocious youth: he was reciting poetry at age two, reading at age three, and writing at age six or seven. His interest in the weird was fostered by his grandfather, who entertained Lovecraft with off-the-cuff weird tales in the Gothic mode.

As a boy Lovecraft was somewhat lonely and suffered from frequent illnesses, many of them apparently psychological. Lovecraft's first appearance in print occurred in 1906, when he wrote a letter on an astronomical matter to The Providence Sunday Journal. Shortly thereafter he began writing a monthly astronomy column for The Pawtuxet Valley Gleaner, a rural paper; he later wrote columns for The Providence Tribune (1906-08) and The Providence Evening News (1914-18), as well as The Asheville (N.C.) Gazette-News (1915).

In 1904 the death of Lovecraft's grandfather, and the subsequent mismanagement of his property and affairs, plunged Lovecraft's family into severe financial difficulties. Lovecraft and his mother were forced to move out of their lavish Victorian home into cramped quarters at 598 Angell Street. Lovecraft was devastated by the loss of his birthplace, and apparently contemplated suicide. In 1908, just prior to his graduation from high school, he suffered a nervous breakdown that compelled him to leave school without a diploma. From 1908 to 1913 Lovecraft was a virtual hermit, doing little save pursuing his astronomical interests and his poetry writing. During this whole period Lovecraft was thrown into an unhealthily close relationship with his mother, who was still suffering from the trauma of her husband's illness and death, and who developed a pathological love-hate relationship with her son.

It was in the amateur world that Lovecraft recommenced the writing of fiction, which he had abandoned in 1908.

Lovecraft's mother, her mental and physical condition deteriorating, suffered a nervous breakdown in 1919 and was admitted to Butler Hospital. Her death on May 24, 1921, however was the result of a bungled gall bladder operation. Lovecraft was shattered by the loss of his mother.

After a marriage and divorce, Lovecraft returned to Providence on April 17, 1926, the last ten years of his life were the time of his greatest writing. He wrote his greatest fiction, from The Call of Cthulhu (1926) to At the Mountains of Madness (1931) to The Shadow out of Time (1934-35).

The last two or three years of his life, however, were filled with hardship. In 1932 his beloved aunt, Mrs. Clark, died and the 1936 suicide of Robert E. Howard, one of his closest correspondents, left him confused and saddened. By this time the illness that would cause his own death--cancer of the intestine--had already progressed so far that little could be done to treat it. Lovecraft attempted to carry on in increasing pain through the winter of 1936-37, but was finally compelled to enter Jane Brown Memorial Hospital on March 10, 1937, where he died five days later. He was buried on March 18 at the Phillips family plot at Swan Point Cemetery.

For a more in-depth history of Lovecraft and to read much of his very prolific correspondence, visit http://www.hplovecraft.com.