H.P. Lovecraft made no secret of his reverence for Edgar Allan Poe. Poe was his “God of Fiction,” he wrote in a letter to Rheinhart Kleiner; to J. Vernon Shea he averred, “If I have ever been able to approximate his kind of thrill, it is only because he himself paved the way by creating a whole atmosphere and method which lesser men can follow with ease.” But what was this “whole atmosphere and method” Lovecraft followed so admiringly? Certainly Poe’s fingerprints can be found within Lovecraft’s works in any number of ways, from the use of the first-person narrator who relates a terrifying experience to the building of a single plot idea to one tremendous climax. But an under-examined influence of Poe on Lovecraft lies, as Deuce Richardson has ably pointed out on this very blog, in the notion of what Lovecraft called cosmic horror.

Lovecraft’s principles of cosmic horror, adumbrated in Supernatural Horror in Literature, clearly echo the effects of the earlier master’s stories. “A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplained dread must be present,” Lovecraft writes, and there must be a hint of a “malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space.” Examples of these qualities in Poe are easily found—the seemingly sentient House of Usher, in all its melancholy and menace; the Raven, surely an expression of “unexplained dread”; even the Red Death’s ghastly triumph, as it holds “illimitable dominion over all.” But perhaps Poe’s clearest example of a tale of cosmic horror is the relatively little-known “Shadow: A Parable.”

“Shadow” begins broodingly, as the narrator tells us that he is writing of his experiences for future readers long after he is dead: “strange things shall happen,” he predicts, “and secret things be known, and many centuries pass away, ere these memorials be seen of men.” He reveals that the events occurred in “a year of terror, and of feelings more intense than terror for which there is no name upon the earth.” There had been signs and sigils, he writes, “and far and wide, over sea and land, the black wings of the Pestilence were spread abroad.” To people who could read the skies, “the heavens wore an aspect of ill.” He goes on to state that the time had arrived when Jupiter was aligned with the rings of Saturn, and “the peculiar spirit of the skies…made itself manifest, not only in the physical orb of the earth, but in the souls, imaginations, and meditations of mankind.”

It’s difficult to think of anyone but Lovecraft here. Poe’s opening paragraphs might almost be from a first draft of “The Call of Cthulhu.” We have the narrator nearing his death, warning us of terrible things to come. We learn that the stars—or at least the planets—have aligned, and that this has infected not only people’s everyday lives, but their thoughts and dreams as well. What’s at stake is not mere personal survival; the universe itself is tilted, off-balance. “Shadow,” then, is hardly the literature of “mere physical fear and the mundanely gruesome” that in his essay Lovecraft disallows from the definition of true cosmic horror. It’s about something much larger and more terrifying.

As for the necessary “atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread,” Poe’s narrator and his companions sit in a room with “black draperies” which shut out “the moon, the lurid stars, and the peopleless streets.” But still they have a terrible feeling of darkness and evil, he writes. “There were things around us and about of which I can render no distinct account—things material and spiritual—heaviness in the atmosphere—a sense of suffocation—anxiety…” We are then told that there is a corpse in the room, his friend Zoilus: “dead and at full length he lay…the genius and the demon of the scene.” The narrator tries singing to banish the terrible mood, but gives up. Finally: “there came forth a dark and undefined shadow—a shadow such as the moon, when low in heaven, might fashion from the figure of a man: but it was the shadow neither of man, nor of God, nor of any familiar thing.”

This surely is cosmic horror in its purest form. Like so many monsters in Lovecraft, the shadow is literally indescribable, an unknowable, incomprehensible being from distant “unplumbed space.” The shadow does speak at last, but not very helpfully: it simply announces, “I am SHADOW,” and as it begins to describe the strange death-world where it dwells, the men assembled realize that the thing’s voice is not that “of any one being, but of a multitude of beings,” which, “varying in their cadences from syllable to syllable, fell duskily upon our ears in the well-remembered and familiar accents of many thousand departed friends.” Shadow is not simply Zoilus’s death, or the narrator’s; Shadow is every death, all Death, and is seemingly as indifferent to its human subjects as any Great Old One of Lovecraft’s. The “whole atmosphere and method” of Poe’s “Shadow” is, then, unmistakably recognizable as what Lovecraft will identify eight decades later as belonging to the world of cosmic horror.

Christopher Conlon’s novel Savaging the Dark was recently listed as one of the 50 Best Horror Books of All Time by Paste Magazine, while his Richard Matheson tribute anthology He Is Legend won the Bram Stoker Award and has been reprinted in several languages. Conlon’s Poe-themed books include Annabel Lee, a novel; the novella The Tell-Tale Soul; and an anthology, Poe’s Lighthouse.