Nightmare Fuel / H. P. Lovecraft

For those planning on sleeping tonight, whelp, good luck.

H. P. Lovecraft is probably one of the most respected horror writers of all time. Pretty much any horror author who came after him owes him for at least one idea. He codified the idea of the Eldritch Abomination in fiction and was one of the first (if not the first) writers of the Cosmic Horror Story. There were so many brown notes in his work, you could call it a brown opera. He is the Trope Namer for Go Mad from the Revelation and the creator of Cthulhu, one of the most well-known monsters in horror literature outside of Dracula or Frankenstein's Monster. In general, he has some pretty spooky stories to his name.

WARNING: Spoilers are unmarked.

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• "Pickman's Model" takes the cake. It's about a painter who draws horrifying, nightmarish portraits... and then it turns out he wasn't using his imagination.
  Well - that paper wasn't a photograph of any background, after all. What it showed was simply the monstrous being he was painting on that awful canvas. It was the model he was using- and its background was merely the wall of the cellar studio in minute detail. But by God, Eliot, it was a photograph from life!
  • Not only is it an excellent discussion on the process of creating horror, the final line is skin-crawlingly creepy. The worst part comes from thinking about other pieces of art that could have been painted in a similar fashion, like the infamous Saturn Devouring His Son.
    "That nauseous wizard had waked the fires of hell in pigment, and his brush had been a nightmare-spawning wand."
• Try reading "The Statement of Randolph Carter." Randolph Carter and his friend Harley Warren go digging in an ancient cemetery. Warren goes alone into its depths, only to discover... something so horrible he pleads with Carter to seal the tomb up and leave him before it gets out. Eventually, he stops responding, even as Carter begs him to respond. And then he gets a response, but it's not Warren...
  YOU FOOL, WARREN IS DEAD!
• Or "The Festival", An eerie story of Kingsport that makes that city even weirder than Innsmouth or Arkham.
• Or "The Whisperer in Darkness" — never look at those "lonely woods" the same way again.
  • The last freakin' sentence.
    "For the things in the chair, perfect to the last, subtle detail of microscopic resemblance — or identity — were the face and hands of Henry Wentworth Akeley."
  • Lovecraft began writing the story either just before or just after the discovery of Pluto in February 1930, and he made Pluto the homeworld of the Mi-Go aka The Whisperers In Darkness. It's one of the few stories that actually give the beings in it a specific homeworld in our own reality. As of 2017, all we know of Pluto are surface images, which indeed show a dark, light-less world of ice and stone like in the story. For all we know, something might be there... waiting...^note Although of course, there's no reason to assume it'd be malevolent or dangerous
  • In a subtly eerie bit of foreshadowing, one of Akeley's letters briefly slips into the first person when describing the anatomy of the Mi-Go, before going back to third person as though nothing happened. Albert Wilmarth doesn't seem to notice the discrepancy, and if the reader starts skimming as they sense an Info Dump coming, they might miss it too.
• Or "The Thing on the Doorstep," or "The Music of Erich Zann". Lovecraft was a master of horror. "The Music of Erich Zann" has some of the best examples of Nothing Is Scarier ever devised. The main character of "Erich Zann" never managed to find his way back to the house he rented from... or the street... or the NEIGHBORHOOD. Was it All Just a Dream? Or somewhere out there, is there some spatial anomaly just waiting to draw in another victim to some bizarre, crumbling neighborhood, where otherwordly music echoes through the air?
• "The Picture in the House." Unusual for Lovecraft, as it does not involve Cosmic Horror Story tropes or even the supernatural, and it actually has fairly effective dialogue. Just a nearly 200-year old cannibal. Also, the single scariest use of italics, ever.
  "They say meat makes blood an' flesh, an' gives ye new life, so I wondered ef 'twudn't make a man live longer an' longer ef 'twas more the same-"
• The Colour Out of Space: It's a story about a goddamned color that will give you nightmares. Lovecraft was just that good. Imagine something so abstract that you can never comprehend it slowly eating you and the entire landscape around you alive over the course of months, and being even unable to flee. And considering that the dam project mentioned in the story was real, one has to wonder how many contemporary readers got really uncomfortable about drinking tap water.
  • His description of the epileptic trees just feels so wrong and vivid.
    ...And yet amidst that tense, godless calm the high bare boughs of all the trees in the yard were moving. They were twitching morbidly and spasmodically, clawing in convulsive and epileptic madness at the moonlit clouds; scratching impotently in the noxious air as if jerked by some alien and bodiless line of linkage with subterrene horrors writhing and struggling below the black roots.
  • The fate of the poor bastards infected by The Colour. At least the animals and plants died quickly, but HUMANS infected by it are, understandably, turned into ravening madmen.
  • The poor farmer's son, who has to deal with his mother who's now a Madwoman in the Attic, after being driven insane by the infection.
  • The strange meteor completely defies all known physics, much to the confusion and mild terror of the professors of Miscatonic University. After about a week of fruitless testing, the remaining fragments simply vaporize, and they're forced to conclude that whatever it was, it likely didnt even originate from within our own universe. With all traces of the meteor gone, some of them wonder if it was ever there at all. If only...
• You think Lovecraft's standard stories are scary? Try reading some of his calm and lucid descriptions of his own real dreams. The man was the living embodiment of Nightmare Fuel.
• The Dunwich Horror. One of the worst things about this one is that, for once, Lovecraft didn't skimp on the descriptions. The titular Horror was only visible for a second, but... Well, how about we just let the witness explain:

  Bigger'n a barn... All made o' squirmin' ropes... Hull thing sort o' shaped like a hen's egg bigger'n anything with dozens o' legs like hogs-heads that haff shut up when they step... Nothin' solid abaout it — all like jelly, an' made o' sep'rit wrigglin' ropes pushed clost together... great bulgin' eyes all over it... Ten or twenty maouths or trunks a-stickin' aout all along the sides, big as stove-pipes an all a-tossin' an openin' an' shuttin'... All grey, with kinder blue or purple rings... An' Gawd it Heaven — that haff face on top...
  ...
  Oh, oh, my Gawd, that haff face — that haff face on top of it... That face with the red eyes an' crinkly albino hair, an' no chin, like the Whateleys... It was a octopus, centipede, spider kind o' thing, but they was a haff-shaped man's face on top of it, an' it looked like Wizard Whateley's, only it was yards an' yards acrost...

  • Wilbur Whateley's true, undisguised form was also pretty dreadful:
    "The back was piebald with yellow and black, and dimly suggested the squamous coloring of certain snakes. Below the waist, though, it was worst; for here all human resemblance left off and sheer phantasy began. The skin was thickly covered with coarse black fur, and from the abdomen a score of long greenish-grey tentacles with red sucking mouths protruded limply. ...On each of the hips, deep set in a kind of pinkish, ciliated orbit, was what seemed to be a rudimentary eye; while in lieu of a tail there depended a kind of trunk or feeler with purple annular markings, and with many evidences of being an undeveloped mouth or throat. The limbs, save for their black fur, roughly resembled the hind legs of prehistoric earth's giant saurians; and terminated in ridgy-veined pads that were neither hooves nor claws.
  • Why did Old Man Whateley do all this, enter a pact with Yog-Sogoth, forced his daughter to bear her monstrous Half-Human Hybrid children, and plan for The End of the World as We Know It that his grandsons would bring about, especially since he would never live to see it? We're never given an explanation for it, there didnt seem to be any sort of advantage in it for him, and he didnt seem deranged enough to want it just For the Evulz.
• "Cool Air". The narrator lives in an apartment below the brilliant Dr. Muñoz, who's obsessed with avoiding death and keeping his apartment as cold as possible. Eventually, the cooling system he uses breaks down, and is forced to stay in a tub full of ice, until the workers hired to keep supplying him flee from the room, terrified out of their wits. Then the narrator enters the apartment and finds a final letter written by the doctor. The next time someone asks you to crank up the AC for them, you're definitely going to think twice...
  ""The end," ran that noisome scrawl, "is here. No more ice -the man looked and ran away. Warmer every minute, and the tissues can't last. I fancy you know -what I said about the will and the nerves and the preserved body after the organs ceased to work. It was good theory, but couldn't keep up indefinitely. There was a gradual deterioration I had not foreseen. Dr. Torres knew, but the shock killed him. He couldn't stand what he had to do -he had to get me in a strange, dark place when he minded my letter and nursed me back. And the organs never would work again. It had to be done my way -preservation -for you see I died that time eighteen years ago."
  • At one point, shortly after the machine breaks down, the doctor has a panicked fit and it's implied his eyes fall out of his skull! He covers his eyes and run into the bathroom, and the narrator mentions that afterwards he's never seen without bandages over his face again.
  • It's telling that despite being one of Lovecraft's best short stories, it was actually rejected by the editor of his regular employer Weird Tales. It's widely belived to be because of the ending, which might have drawn censorship for its gruesome nature.
• "The Dreams in the Witch House" is particularly scary due to the protagonist's sheer confusion. You may be afraid of raccoon tracks for about a month afterward because of the witch's familiar Brown Jenkin, whose paws — like raccoons' — resemble tiny human hands.
• "The Call of Cthulhu," the most famous of all things Lovecraft and the birthing place of the horrid thing itself.
  • "The stars were right again, and what an age-old cult had failed to do by design, a band of innocent sailors had done by accident. After vigintillions of years great Cthulhu was loose again, and ravening for delight."
  • The cult holding ceremonies in the swamp. They're so terrifying and repulsive that the normally insular and isolationist swamp settlers have called on the state police to help, because this is something so far beyond what even they can tolerate they're even willing to ask for help from the hated federal goverment. The 2005 silent movie version had an excellent adaptation of the scene where the police head deeper into the swamp, following the sounds of the drums and screams. Finally, they find the ceremony itself, and it's like looking through a window into Hell.
  Cajun: This ain't no negro voodoo, this is the Devil hisself.
  • The reveal of the Cthulhu figurine at the Archeologist convention, which is so horrible that all of the attending explorers are stunned into silence...all except one, an aged man with one eye, who is the only one there who has seen something similar before. Decades earlier, he had visited an outcast tribe of Inuits in Greenland, who had been exiled for their depraved beliefs. He forced one of the tribal members to show him to their shrine, kept on an isolated rock, where he finds another Cthulhu figure, carved out of a walrus tusk. With the explorer distracted by his find, his "guide" takes the opportunity to attack him, and carves out his eye using a fishing tool.
• The Shadow Over Innsmouth:
  • When the village drunk tells the protagonist the tale about the reason the people of Innsmouth are part-fish. Some real Squick when he mentions that the sailors mated with some strange-looking fish! That isn't the worst of it: The protagonist is also part of the Innsmouth folk and, upon learning this, he decides to invite his family to swim in the water in a manner that is seriously creepy.
  • The sequence in which the protagonist is pursued through the town at night by its residents from his hotel room all the way to the surrounding roads, hiding in crumbling houses that contain unseen horrors and praying the townspeople's car headlights don't find him, is one of the most harrowing chase scenes in literature.
  • Zaddok Allen's Info Dump about what happened in Innsmouth and the truth about the "plague" that wiped out so many of the original inhabitants. He also mentions that the Deep Ones could easily overwhelm humanity and conquer the surface, and the reason they haven't is basically because they don't feel like it. But anger them, like the original inhabitants did, and you'll regret it...
• "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward." Even if you see the twist that Curwen had come back to life and killed Ward to assume his identity coming from a mile away, the storytelling is so good, and the writing so skin-crawlingly creepy, that it doesn't matter. Now that is some damned effective horror.
• Similarly, we have Under the Pyramids, listed here as "Imprisoned with the Pharaohs," a Lovecraft story that relates Harry Houdini's (fictional) experience in Egypt. After being lowered into a pit near the Giza pyramids and The Sphinx, Houdini finds a large procession of undead led by Pharaoh Khephren, the king who remodeled the Sphinx after himself, and though he cannot bring himself to look directly at the members of the procession, the shadows that flicker on the wall brings to his mind the stories he had heard from Bedouins about blasphemous priestly experiments, with mummies constructed to look like the Egyptian gods, with the bodies of men, and the heads of animals, rejected by all sane divine forces and erased from all historical accounts. He then watches an elaborate ceremony that eventually reveals... something which has 5 heads and tentacles sprouting from its mouths. Except these are actually the toes and the claws of the creature; the narrator simply mistakes the being's single paw for the creature itself. Then, just as he's managed to nearly escape the ceremony, the creature fully reveals itself. The thing's true face, which is supposed to have been the Sphinx's original image, is left completely to the reader's imagination.
  • After awakening, the narrator can find no trace that what he saw really happened... except no one else seems to remember the treacherous guide who had led him into the ambush in the first place. The same guide who possessed an unsettling likeness to Pharaoh Khephren...
• Juan Romero from "The Transition Of Juan Romero" disappeared in a bottomless red-lighted cavern beneath Cactus Range, filled with monstrous shapes. In "The Mound", there is the deep red-lighted cavern of Yoth beneath the subterranean land of K’nyan, which is itself sited somewhere deep beneath Binger, Oklahoma - more than 1000 miles away in a straight line. This means the entire North American continent is honeycombed with stacked up monstrous underground worlds populated by not-quite-human creatures.
• "Herbert West–Reanimator" It's not that Mr. West reanimates the dead; it's what he reanimates them as.
  • West attempts to test his reanimating serum on Dr. Halsey, the recently deceased dean of Miskatonic University's medical college. Halsey comes back as a bloodthirsty monster that kills sixteen people before being subdued. West's response? "Dammit, it wasn't quite fresh enough!"
  • During World War I, West starts experimenting with reanimating severed body parts. Including the severed head and headless torso of one of his former colleagues.
  • West refuses to abandon his research even though it's clear that the process is always going to produce insane, psychotic monsters no matter how "fresh" the body is. He thinks the problem is that the brain is always too decayed to bring back the original person, but never seems to entertain the idea that it's the serum thats the problem.
• "The Terrible Old Man."
  • Three thieves attempt to rob an old, mysterious man, and get more than they bargained for. Given something of a Setting Update by FEWDIO Horror's "The Prey." The tone of the story up until the very last page is very much the cynical amusement of Bierce or Twain, which makes The Reveal that much worse.
  "But when he looked, he did not see what he had expected; for his colleagues were not there at all, but only the Terrible Old Man leaning quietly on his knotted cane and smiling hideously. Mr. Czanek had never before noticed the colour of that man’s eyes; now he saw that they were yellow.
  
  Little things make considerable excitement in little towns, which is the reason that Kingsport people talked all that spring and summer about the three unidentifiable bodies, horribly slashed as with many cutlasses, and horribly mangled as by the tread of many cruel boot-heels, which the tide washed in."
  • The Old Man has another appearance in a story set in the same town, concerning an old wooden house seated atop a cliff by the oceanside, with its only door facing the ocean, and no stairs or road leading to it. The Old Man mentions that the house was ancient even when his grandfather was a boy. The narrator even mentions that, considering the age of The Old Man, that must date back to the very earliest days of colonial America, if not before that.

• While The Rats in the Walls lacks any of the explicitly supernatural elements found in most Lovecraft stories, it is no slouch in the horror department. In particular, there is every bit of what they find beneath the old priory, and then what this revelation does to the protagonist.
  ". . .they found me in the blackness after three hours; found me crouching in the blackness over the plump, half-eaten body of Capt. Norrys, with my own cat leaping and tearing at my throat. Now they have blown up Exham Priory, taken my cat away from me, and shut me into this barred room at Hanwell with fearful whispers about my heredity and experiences."

• "Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family." The title character's family has been weird and animalistic ever since his great-great-great-grandfather brought back a mysterious wife that nobody saw much of after returning from the Congo. Arthur Jermyn seeks more knowledge of his ancestry, and eventually obtains the mummified body of a female white ape from an unknown species very close to humanity... who also happens to be his great-great-great-grandmother. He doesn't take it well.

• Nyarlathotep. What makes him so especially scary among the nightmarish pantheon of Outer Gods is that, unlike every other one of them, he is interested in humanity. Specifically, in dooming us all to madness and despair. And, he can take any form he wants, potentially up to and including the other Outer Gods themselves. Which means that every single politician you elect, religious figure you worship, and celebrity you admire could all be mere avatars of a horrifying entity hellbent on driving every single one of us as insane as possible.
  • The titular being in "The Haunter of the Dark", which is referred to as an avatar of Nyarlathotep, is repelled by light and can only move around in complete darkness, confining it to the windowless steeple of an abandoned church where it was once worshiped. After Robert Blake indavertently summons it, he thinks he can evade it by leaving the lights on in his apartment after dark — until a thunderstorm weakens the city's electrical power one night. Blake keeps writing in his diary throughout the night, his entries becoming increasingly panicked as he realizes there's no escape for him ("The lights must not go"; "It knows where I am") until finally, the power goes out all over the city. He is found dead the next morning, staring out of his window at the church with a look of pure horror on his face, and the last notes in his diary describe him helplessly watching the creature as it comes for him in the dark:
    "I see it — coming here — hell-wind — titan-blur — black wings — Yog-Sothoth save me — the three-lobed burning eye..."

• The Shadow Out of Time seems almost tame until you consider the full implications of the story. Humanity is not permanent, and we apparently last for such a short time that the Great Race Of Yith considers us a speedbump in history, something to be passed over after studying us for a bit. As far as the Lovecraftian mythos is concerned, humanity is doomed. Whatever our doom is, the Great Race Of Yith has decided to utterly skip humanity, and instead choose to inhabit a race of sapient giant beetles that would come after us rather than risk getting caught up in what is coming. In-Universe, there is no changing or avoiding that future. Sooner or later, one of the horrors of the Lovecraftian mythos wipes out humanity, if we don't do it to ourselves, and something comes along to replace us afterward.

• After reading about the horrors that Lovecraft's universe has to offer, you might be wondering who the Top God is. The answer is Azathoth, the Daemon Sultan who resides at the very center of the Universe and is the creator of all things. What sort of deity would create a universe overflowing with horrifying monsters, aliens, and unspeakable things? Some horrifying Mad God? Nope. The answer is a Blind Idiot. Azathoth is a completely mindless embodiment of Primordial Chaos, with no personality, autonomy, or even solid physical form. The universe and all of its residents, including the other Outer Gods, are part of one vast dream that the omnipotent being is having while it sleeps. The instant that it wakes up, which is just a matter of when, everything will cease to exist, and Azathoth will be completely oblivious that anything was ever there at all.

• Probably the worst thing about it all, is that most of the Cosmic Horror beings stance on humanity in general, they don't care. in comparison to their power and way of life and thinking, we are literally nothing to them, even worse, all the madness and death they cause by being a living (at least their definition of living) Brown Note? Just a side-effect! They literally cause it by being witnessed/heard by us on accident, as our minds literally cannot take their full influence, they can wipe us out in a blink (if they have eyes to blink), just by existing, they don't mean it, it just happens.
  • While the terror of his stories has slightly faded due to the fact that "Humanity is not the center of the universe" is no longer so inherently terrifying as it once was, the existential dread of the Cosmic Horror entities is still potent. Humans, in comparison to many of the things that populate the mythos, are less than ants compared to these horrors, since a swarm of ants could possibly kill a human. We are less than bacteria or viruses, as at least those can potentially kill a human being. Imagine being so inferior to another lifeform that you are less than ants, bacteria, and viruses in comparison. That is the true horror of the Lovecraftian cosmos, that we are so laughably inferior that we sit somewhere between microorganisms and nothing in relation to how we compare to them.
• This◊ photo of H.P Lovecraft, the shadow covering his eyes, Lovecraft not showing any emotion and the fact that he looks like he's staring directly at you suits perfectly with the types of stories he wrote.
• Late in his life, Lovecraft wrote some critiques regarding the laissez-faire capitalist system, and even warned everyone about the horrors of it. While the very same man had radically different political shift during 1930s, his signature writing style of Cosmic Horror has retained in his critiques on the very system widespread in his societies. However, Lovecraft became an Ignored Expert regarding politics throughout history, and most who knew about Lovecraft didn't ever try to check out what's going in his later life. Biographer S.T. Joshi did, and examines these writings in his 1990 book The Decline of the West.
  • Though, overlapping with Harsher in Hindsight, more recent generations are gradually losing faith in capitalism altogether, and questioning of the very system is becoming increasingly common. The man who wrote Nyarlathotep and other cosmic horrors provided an eerily-accurate prediction on the bleak sociopolitical environment in the real-world future.
    It was as if Lovecraft had a crystal ball, and saw Ronald Reagan in it. — S.T. Joshi

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