barbara hambly--apology for lovecraft

''i wish i could write like h.p. lovecraft. lovecraft was a man with a vision of the world: astonishing macabre, intricate as a giger drawing. his sense of cosmoses opening out of cosmoses, of dark abysses concealing in their hearts the entrances to further gulfs, infuses nearly everything he wrote with an atmosphere, not of horror, but of wonder. his worlds have an air of completeness.

''the things that can be said about howard phillips lovecraft don't sum up, or even come close to summing up, what his writing is. on the downside, his writing is racist and sexist and wildly open to parody because it is so original, so idiosyncratic. every year or so I go on a lovecraft binge, devouring story after story the way a glutton sits in a corner devouring cookies. then I associate with those persons of more elevated tastes and feel a little ashamed of myself. but then I meet the eyes of other lovecraft addicts, and we smile.

''reading lovecraft's writing, one has the impression of a man so caught up in his vision that he is struggling to find language with which to share what he sees. bizarre and elaborate words, piled atop one another in baroque cacophony, seem the only outlet he can find to convey the fulgent richness of his dream, to explain what is, at heart, inexplicable or at least incomprehensible: to name the nightmare. to those of a certain temperament, that legion of my fellow addicts, h.p. lovecraft's tales are enormous fun.

''in many of the lesser-known stories we find themes or images that recur in later or better-known works, stories played out from other angles but returning again and again to the same core nightmares. ... the takeover of ones body by some entity of the past ... "bad blood" or evil or alien ancestry, forgotten for a time, that returns to destroy an innocent scion of the family. ... men ( at the moment I cannot think of a single lovecraft story in which a woman was the linchpin of the plot's evil--even asenath Waite was actually a man ) who delved for forbidden knowledge, acquired forbidden knowledge, and surrendered their humanity in the process. ... his thesis that humanity is but a blundering set of Johnny-come-lately peasants stumbling amid the terrible secrets of unknown ancients opens the door to endless narrative possibilities. ...

'' i'm still not sure that any of this explains the fascination of lovecraft, the power that his images and themes exert over so much of the literature of horror and the fantastic, ... maybe it's just that lovecraft takes such obvious pleasure in what he writes. enthusiasm is contagious. he was clearly a man who loved his craft.''

barbara hambly; the man who loved his craft.