H.P. Lovecraft died on March 15 in 1937. I would've posted this a few days ago in memory of that fateful moment, but, as Karl Spackler might say, I was unavoidably detained. Still, the blog entry below says things that need saying, so, better late than never.

Lovecraft expired in penurious obscurity, but eighty-three years later, it can be safely said that HPL has triumphed over his naysayers and over the vast majority of his contemporaries whom the literati of the time considered "important". In the field of horror, as Robert M. Price noted in an excellent essay a few years ago, Lovecraft has "won". He has won and--I predict--he will continue winning. The fact that a film director has finally figured out how to faithfully and successfully translate HPL to the silver screen is just one indication that a new Lovecraftian renaissance is probably in the making.

The cover for Lovecraft: The Blasphemously Large First Issue, which was released in 2015. — The cover for *Lovecraft: The Blasphemously Large First Issue*, which was released in 2015.

However, fame, notoriety and cultural ubiquity also lead to ill-informed stereotypes and stupid memes. The one I'll look at today is "All of HPL's stories end with his protagonist seeing a tentacled monster, running away and then being devoured and/or driven insane". This meme is closely linked to "Robert E. Howard heroes see a monster and kill it. HPL heroes lose their minds."

Like most stereotypes, this is generally true, but certainly not one hundred percent accurate. REH wrote some yarns where the protagonist--after witnessing unspeakable horrors--either died, went mad or killed himself. HPL penned some tales where his protagonists actively fought back, sometimes even winning--for now. Those are the Lovecraft stories I'll look at today.

I should note that much of the violence that takes place in the stories I'm examining occurs at--or near--the end of the tales in question. Spoilers are inevitable. If you are one of the poor souls out there who is afflicted with spoilerphobia, proceed onward with care.

A stand-out moment of Lovecraftian violence can be found in "The Dreams in the Witch House". The protagonist, Gilman, has gradually been brought under the sway of the witch, Keziah Mason. She then tries to make him assist in the sacrifice of a human infant. Mayhem ensues:

"In an instant he had edged up the slanting floor around the end of the table and wrenched the knife from the old woman’s claws; sending it clattering over the brink of the narrow triangular gulf. In another instant, however, matters were reversed; for those murderous claws had locked themselves tightly around his own throat, while the wrinkled face was twisted with insane fury. He felt the chain of the cheap crucifix grinding into his neck, and in his peril wondered how the sight of the object itself would affect the evil creature. Her strength was altogether superhuman, but as she continued her choking he reached feebly in his shirt and drew out the metal symbol, snapping the chain and pulling it free.
At sight of the device the witch seemed struck with panic, and her grip relaxed long enough to give Gilman a chance to break it entirely. He pulled the steel-like claws from his neck, and would have dragged the beldame over the edge of the gulf had not the claws received a fresh access of strength and closed in again. This time he resolved to reply in kind, and his own hands reached out for the creature’s throat. Before she saw what he was doing he had the chain of the crucifix twisted about her neck, and a moment later he had tightened it enough to cut off her breath."

Gilman put that bad bitch down.

In "From Beyond", Tillinghast--the friend of the nameless narrator--has constructed a machine which allows dangerous creatures from another dimension into our own. The experiment goes too far and the narrator takes decisive action, placing his pistol shot precisely where it will do the most good:

"What remains to be told is very brief, and may be familiar to you from the newspaper accounts. The police heard a shot in the old Tillinghast house and found us there—Tillinghast dead and me unconscious. They arrested me because the revolver was in my hand, but released me in three hours, after they found it was apoplexy which had finished Tillinghast and saw that my shot had been directed at the noxious machine which now lay hopelessly shattered on the laboratory floor."

The narrator did not shoot Tillinghast. Tillinghast was his friend, for one thing, albeit, the man had obviously gone insane. No, he blasted Tillinghast's machine which was allowing the transdimensional creatures access to our dimesnion. One well-placed round saved the narrator and, possibly, our entire universe. The gunman was a man of steely nerves and a cool intellect. Since none of us have seen anything close to what he witnessed, who are we to judge him for losing consciousness—after saving the world?

Lovecraft's classic tale, "The Thing on the Doorstep", concerns Edward Pickman Derby and his friend, Daniel Upton. Derby marries Asenath Waite. It gradually becomes apparent that Asenath's body actually houses the soul of her father, the sorcerer, Ephraim Waite. In desperation, Derby brains "Asenath" with a candlestick but Ephraim manages to switch their souls, casting Derby's soul into Asenath's corpse. Derby--whose body is now inhabited by Ephraim--is sent to a sanitarium. Upton--realizing what has happened--visits the sanitarium and puts six bullets through the skull of "Derby". The actions of a gibbering, nutless weakling? Far from it. He avenged his friend and was willing to face prison or the electric chair to do what needed done.

The piece de resistance is, fittingly enough, HPL's landmark horror tale, "The Call of Cthulhu". There are several incidents of extreme violence perpetrated by two of the narrators within this complex story. The first instance is when Inspector LeGrasse leads his team of policemen into the Louisiana swamps to confront a gathering of degenerate Cthulhu cultists:

"Duty came first; and although there must have been nearly a hundred mongrel celebrants in the throng, the police relied on their firearms and plunged determinedly into the nauseous rout. For five minutes the resultant din and chaos were beyond description. Wild blows were struck, shots were fired, and escapes were made; but in the end Legrasse was able to count some forty-seven sullen prisoners, whom he forced to dress in haste and fall into line between two rows of policemen. Five of the worshippers lay dead, and two severely wounded ones were carried away on improvised stretchers by their fellow-prisoners."

LeGrasse: kickin' ass and takin' names. C.J. Henderson chronicled the further eldritch adventures of Inspector LeGrasse, by the way.

LeGrasse was no coward, but the crown of world-class bad-ass goes to the Norseman, Gustaf Johansen, second mate of the Emma. He and the other ten men of his crew had to deal with degenerate Cthulhu cultists armed with brass cannon:

"The Emma, [Johansen] says, was delayed and thrown widely south of her course by the great storm of March 1st [and then] encountered the Alert, manned by a queer and evil-looking crew of Kanakas and half-castes. Being ordered peremptorily to turn back, Capt. Collins refused; whereupon the strange crew began to fire savagely and without warning upon the schooner with a peculiarly heavy battery of brass cannon forming part of the yacht’s equipment. The Emma’s men shewed fight, says the survivor, and though the schooner began to sink from shots beneath the waterline they managed to heave alongside their enemy and board her, grappling with the savage crew on the yacht’s deck, and being forced to kill them all..."

His own ship sinking under his feet and his captain dead, Johansen rallied the crew and seized the enemy vessel, whereupon he took the surviving cultists captive and killed them all. No Geneva convention for Cthulhu-lovers—who were apparently resisting vigorously. We have this later testimony from Johansen:

"Once more under control, the [Emma] was making good progress when held up by the Alert on March 22nd, and I could feel the mate’s regret as [Johansen] wrote of her bombardment and sinking. Of the swarthy cult-fiends on the Alert he speaks with significant horror. There was some peculiarly abominable quality about them which made their destruction seem almost a duty, and Johansen shews ingenuous wonder at the charge of ruthlessness brought against his party during the proceedings of the court of inquiry."

Johansen knew how to put corrupted, humanity-hating vermin down. He then makes a fateful decision that will lead to him saving the entire world:

"Then, driven ahead by curiosity in their captured yacht under Johansen’s command, the men sight a great stone pillar sticking out of the sea, and in S. Latitude 47° 9′, W. Longitude 126° 43′ come upon a coast-line of mingled mud, ooze, and weedy Cyclopean masonry which can be nothing less than the tangible substance of earth’s supreme terror—the nightmare corpse-city of R’lyeh, that was built in measureless aeons behind history by the vast, loathsome shapes that seeped down from the dark stars."

Cthulhu awakens and slaughters most of the crew. The Norseman and one other crew member make it back to their captured steam-yacht, the Alert:

"Steam [in the engines] had not been suffered to go down entirely, despite the departure of all hands for the shore; and it was the work of only a few moments of feverish rushing up and down between wheel and engines to get the Alert under way. Slowly, amidst the distorted horrors of that indescribable scene, she began to churn the lethal waters; whilst on the masonry of that charnel shore that was not of earth the titan Thing from the stars slavered and gibbered like Polypheme cursing the fleeing ship of Odysseus. Then, bolder than the storied Cyclops, great Cthulhu slid greasily into the water and began to pursue with vast wave-raising strokes of cosmic potency. Briden looked back and went mad, laughing shrilly as he kept on laughing at intervals till death found him one night in the cabin whilst Johansen was wandering deliriously.

But Johansen had not given out yet. Knowing that the Thing could surely overtake the Alert until steam was fully up, he resolved on a desperate chance; and, setting the engine for full speed, ran lightning-like on deck and reversed the wheel. There was a mighty eddying and foaming in the noisome brine, and as the steam mounted higher and higher the brave Norwegian drove his vessel head on against the pursuing jelly which rose above the unclean froth like the stern of a daemon galleon. The awful squid-head with writhing feelers came nearly up to the bowsprit of the sturdy yacht, but Johansen drove on relentlessly. There was a bursting as of an exploding bladder, a slushy nastiness as of a cloven sunfish, a stench as of a thousand opened graves, and a sound that the chronicler would not put on paper. For an instant the ship was befouled by an acrid and blinding green cloud, and then there was only a venomous seething astern; where—God in heaven!—the scattered plasticity of that nameless sky-spawn was nebulously recombining in its hateful original form, whilst its distance widened every second as the Alert gained impetus from its mounting steam."

That's right. Finding himself pursued by Cthulhu, Johansen made a U-turn, drove his ship right through Cthulhu's head and saved the entire world from madness and utter ruin. Conan never did anything comparable. Johansen had balls of tungsten steel and H.P. Lovecraft is the man who dreamed up and wrote that entire scene. It's no wonder that Robert E. Howard considered "The Call of Cthulhu" one of the greatest stories of all time.

I'll wrap this up for now, but I have plenty more examples of Lovecraftian protagonists kickin' ass and staying reasonably sane. This post probably should have been titled "Thundering Guns of HPL" or somesuch, but I like carrying on the "Savage Swords" titling tradition that’s been established here at the DMR Blog. Besides, there will be a few swords featured in my follow-up post. And flamethrowers.

As a parting shot to the HPL hatas, just follow this link to Lovecraft's "The Teuton's Battle-Song". Ol' H.P. wrote that when REH was ten years old.

Johansen getting ready to turn the tables on the Big C.