23 Hours of H.P. Lovecraft Stories: Hear Readings & Dramatizations of “The Call of Cthulhu,” “The Shadow Over Innsmouth,” & Other Weird Tales

Image by Lucius B. Trues­dell, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

H.P. Love­craft has some­what fall­en out of favor in many cir­cles of hor­ror and fan­ta­sy writ­ing. Just this past year, after much debate, the World Fan­ta­sy Awards decid­ed to remove his like­ness from their stat­uette. Because, quite frankly, Love­craft was not only a big­ot but a com­mit­ted anti-Semi­te and white suprema­cist who loathed vir­tu­al­ly every­one who wasn’t, as he put it, “Nordic-Amer­i­can.” This includ­ed African-Amer­i­cans and “stunt­ed bra­cy­cephal­ic South-Ital­ians & rat-faced half-Mon­goloid Russ­ian & Pol­ish Jews, & all that cursed scum,” as he wrote in a let­ter to fel­low writer August Der­leth. The state­ment is rep­re­sen­ta­tive of many, many more on the sub­ject.

Were these sim­ply pri­vate polit­i­cal opin­ions and noth­ing more, there might not be suf­fi­cient rea­son to read them into his work, but as sev­er­al peo­ple have argued con­vinc­ing­ly, Lovecraft’s opin­ions form the basis of so much of his work. Chi­na Miéville, for exam­ple, writes “I fol­low [French nov­el­ist Michel Houelle­becq—hard­ly known for any kind of polit­i­cal cor­rect­ness] in think­ing that Lovecraft’s oeu­vre, his work itself, is inspired by and deeply struc­tured with race hatred. As Houelle­becq said, it is racism itself that rais­es in Love­craft a ‘poet­ic trance.’”

Lovecraft’s xeno­pho­bic loathing begins to seem like an almost patho­log­i­cal hatred and fear of any­one dif­fer­ent, and of any kind of change in the nation’s make­up. It goes far beyond casu­al “man of his time” atti­tudes (and increas­ing­ly, of our time). F. Scott Fitzger­ald lived dur­ing Lovecraft’s time. And Fitzger­ald had the crit­i­cal dis­tance to sat­i­rize fanat­i­cal big­otry like Love­craft’s in The Great Gats­by’s Tom Buchanan. All of that said, how­ev­er, it’s impos­si­ble to deny Lovecraft’s influ­ence on hor­ror and fan­ta­sy, and almost no one has done so, even among those writ­ers who most vehe­ment­ly lob­bied to retire his image or who found his pres­ence deeply trou­bling.

World Fan­ta­sy Award win­ner Nne­di Oko­rafor writes about con­tem­po­rary authors hav­ing to wres­tle with the fact “that many of The Elders we hon­or and need to learn from hate or hat­ed us.” Win­ner Sofia Samatar, who want­ed the stat­uette changed, exclaimed, “I am not telling any­body not to read Love­craft. I teach Love­craft! I actu­al­ly insist that peo­ple read him and write about him!” In a short essay at Tor, sci-fi and fan­ta­sy writer Eliz­a­beth Bear expressed many of the same ambiva­lent feel­ings about her “com­pli­cat­ed rela­tion­ship with Love­craft.” While find­ing his “big­otry of just about any stripe you like… revolt­ing,” his work has nonethe­less pro­vid­ed “a pow­er­ful source of inspi­ra­tion, the foun­da­tions of it like Hadrian’s Wall; full of mate­r­i­al for min­ing and repur­pos­ing.”

It’s not par­tic­u­lar­ly unusu­al to find such ambiva­lent atti­tudes expressed toward lit­er­ary ances­tors. All artists—all people—have their char­ac­ter flaws, and to expect every writer we like to share our val­ues seems naive, nar­row, and super­fi­cial. But Love­craft presents an extreme exam­ple, and also one whose prose is often pret­ty ter­ri­ble: over­stuffed, over­wrought, pre­ten­tious, and archa­ic. But it’s that pulpy style that makes Love­craft, Lovecraft—that con­tributes to the fever­ish atmos­phere of para­noia and alien­ation in his sto­ries. “He’s a mas­ter of mood,” Bear avows, “of sweep­ing blast­ed vis­tas of despair and the bone-soak­ing cold of space.”

That much of his despair and hor­ror emanat­ed from a place inside him that feared the “ges­tures & jab­ber­ing” of oth­er humans does not make it any less effec­tive­ly creepy or hyp­not­ic. It just makes it that much hard­er to love Love­craft the author, no mat­ter how much we might admire his work. But per­haps Love­craft was such an effec­tive hor­ror writer pre­cise­ly because he was so ter­ri­bly afraid of change and dif­fer­ence. As he him­self wrote of his par­tic­u­lar brand of super­nat­ur­al hor­ror, or “weird fic­tion,” as he called it: “hor­ror and the unknown or the strange are always close­ly con­nect­ed… because fear is our deep­est and strongest emo­tion.” One need­n’t be a pho­bic racist to write good hor­ror fic­tion, but in Love­craft’s case, I guess, it seems to have helped.

Just as much as the work of Isaac Asi­mov, or Robert Hein­lein, or Gene Rod­den­ber­ry resides in the DNA of sci­ence fic­tion, so too does Love­craft inhab­it the organ­ic build­ing blocks of hor­ror writ­ing. Hor­ror and fan­ta­sy writ­ers who some­how avoid read­ing Love­craft may end up absorb­ing his influ­ence any­way; read­ers who avoid him will end up read­ing some ver­sion of “Love­craft pas­tiche,” as Bear puts it. So it behooves us to go to the source, find out what Love­craft him­self wrote, take the good over the bad, even “pick a fight with him,” writes Bear, “because of what he does right, that makes his sto­ries too com­pelling to just walk away from, and because of what he does wrong… for exam­ple, the way he treats peo­ple as things.”

We’ve pre­vi­ous­ly brought to your atten­tion sev­er­al online Love­craft archives, such as this com­pi­la­tion of Love­craft eBooks and audio­books, and these many fine drama­ti­za­tions of Love­craft’s sto­ries. Addi­tion­al­ly, you can down­load many of Love­craft’s sto­ries and let­ters pub­lished in the sem­i­nal hor­ror and fan­ta­sy mag­a­zine Weird Tales. And in the Spo­ti­fy playlist above (down­load Spo­ti­fy here if you need it), you can hear The H.P. Love­craft Com­pendi­um, 23 hours of read­ings and drama­ti­za­tions of Love­craft’s creepy short sto­ries and novel­las, includ­ing The Shad­ow Over Inns­mouth, “The Dun­wich Hor­ror,” The Whis­per­er in Dark­ness, “The Call of Cthul­hu,” and many, many more. How­ev­er repug­nant many of Love­craft’s atti­tudes, there’s no deny­ing the pow­er of his “weird fic­tion.” As the playlist advis­es, “you might want to leave a light on when lis­ten­ing to these chill­ing per­for­mances.…”

This playlist will be added to our col­lec­tion, 1,000 Free Audio Books: Down­load Great Books for Free.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

H.P. Lovecraft’s Clas­sic Hor­ror Sto­ries Free Online: Down­load Audio Books, eBooks & More

Hear Drama­ti­za­tions of H.P. Lovecraft’s Sto­ries On His Birth­day: “The Call of Cthul­hu,” “The Dun­wich Hor­ror,” & More

Down­load Issues of “Weird Tales” (1923–1954): The Pio­neer­ing Pulp Hor­ror Mag­a­zine Fea­tures Orig­i­nal Sto­ries by Love­craft, Brad­bury & Many More

H.P. Love­craft Gives Five Tips for Writ­ing a Hor­ror Sto­ry, or Any Piece of “Weird Fic­tion”

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness