Reading Joyce Carol Oates’ "The Fabled Light-house of Viña del Mar," which I greatly enjoyed, has made me realize that it isn’t the recurring elements traditional to Lovecraftian fiction that I’ve grown tired of. Rather it’s the poor writers who consistently use and abuse them. There is so much bad Lovecraft lit out there, so very much.
There is little market for Lovecraft-lit outside of the Lovecraft ‘zines and fan mags. Nobody is going to make much money, much less a career, on writing Lovecraftian fiction – even Lovecraft himself couldn’t make a career of it. Defenders of this particular subgenre may cite as examples of such success the writers Brian Lumley and Robert Bloch, who began their careers playing with and adding to Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos. But it wasn’t until Lumley and Bloch broke away and started writing their own stories that they truly became successful.
Lovecraft-lit is really just another form of fan fiction. Even if you’re only writing in the so-called Lovecraftian style, you’re still playing with someone else’s toys. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but if you plan to make a career of writing, you’d be wise to use your time developing your own voice.
T.E.D. Klein is another author who, like Lumley and Bloch, seemed to have grown tired of being compared to Lovecraft and wrote a novella about an author in a similar situation. The novella is called Black Man with a Horn, and can be found, along with three other equally good novellas, in the collection Dark Gods. Here’s an excerpt:
… I settled back and reached for the paperback in my pocket. They’d finally gotten around to reprinting one of my earlier tales, and already I’d found four typos. But then, what could one expect? The front cover, with its crude cartoon skull, said it all: Goosepimples: Thirteen Cosmic Chillers in the Lovecraft Tradition .
So this is what I was reduced to — a lifetime’s work shrugged off by some blurb-writer as “worthy of the Master himself,” the creations of my brain dismissed as mere pastiche. And the tales themselves, once singled out for such elaborate praise, were now simply — as if this were commendation enough — "Lovecraftian." Ah, Howard, your triumph was complete the moment your name became an adjective.
I’d suspected it for years, of course, but only with the past week’s conference had I been forced to acknowledge the fact: that what mattered to the present generation was not my own body of work, but rather my association with Lovecraft. And even this was demeaned: after years of friendship and support, to be labeled — simply because I’d been younger — a mere "disciple." It seemed too cruel a joke.
Klein himself seems to be someone else who is reluctant to reside in Lovecraft’s admittedly grand shadow. After all, it’s one thing to be classified as a "horror writer," but quite another to be further pigeonholed as an author of "Lovecraftian horror fiction." Such a label might seem complimentary to those who salivate over all things Lovecraft, but for an author trying to carve his own niche in the publishing world, it’s not necessarily a good thing. Consider how you would feel if you were a writer and all anyone had to say about your work was how evocative it was of someone else’s work? You might at first be flattered to be compared to such an author as H.P. Lovecraft, but I assure you, after a time you would grow tired of such comparisons and might even start to question the ability of your work to stand on its own.
While we’re on the Lovecraft topic, Salon.com has posted a cover story on the man, which you can find here. (Thanks to Sheldon for the heads up.)
Ian
New links: Michael C
habon, Andrew Pyper, AGNI, The Antioch Review, Boulevard, The Chicago Review, Conjunctions, Descant, Glimmer Train, McSweeney’s, Witness, Bleak House Books, Donald M. Grant, and Salon.com.
