Today is the 130th anniversary of the birth of H.P. Lovecraft, and Dave has asked me to put some words together on the subject of this absolute Titan of Weird fiction. I will try my best to do the Man of Providence justice.

Personally, as a man with religious leanings, I have always found horror in its more traditional forms to be comforting and even instructive, in a slightly perverse way.

Devils coming to collect from a bad bargain, angry ghosts, bloodthirsty vampires, vengeful spirits – terrifying in the flesh (so to speak) no doubt, but from a distance these ghastly manifestations offer some helpful lessons for those willing to listen.

Faust dragged off to hell? Well, can’t say he wasn’t warned. Your home being torn apart by spirits of the dead? You shouldn’t have built it over that sacred burial ground. Possessed by the devil? That’s what you get for playing with a Ouija board – and even then, a good priest ought to set things right.

But more than this, such stories offer an appealing view of the cosmos and our place in it. When a vampire cringes away from a holy symbol, we are indirectly told that not only does a divine power exist, but that it has an interest in our welfare. A disturbed grave will lead to an unquiet spirit – but rectify the former, and the latter disappears. Life after death exists, then, and communion between that world and our own is possible.

During the filming of The Shining Stanley Kubrick supposedly told Stephen King that he found ghost stories optimistic insofar as they suggested life after death. King replied that there was always hell – but, even so, the concept of hell is so widespread across cultures, faiths and peoples that it too can claim its place in a vision of a governed, rational cosmos; indeed, according to various schools of Buddhism, Hinduism and not a few of Christianity, even the damned may, in time, be afforded another chance at salvation.

None of this Cosmic Optimism has any place in Lovecraft.

Lovecraft’s stories speak with a voice that echoes the late 19th century wave of scepticism – Freud, Marx, Feuerbach and Darwin. Humanity is no special creation. We are made in no god’s image. We are a cosmic accident, and nothing more.

If this element alone was the foundation of Lovecraft’s work his stories might have turned out as restrained, meditative pieces that had at their core a kind of quiet despair; Dover Beach with some Weird trappings, perhaps. But of course the last thing you could call Lovecraft is restrained. His work bulges with bloodthirsty cults, hideous monsters, slumbering gods in ancient darkness and ordinary men driven to insanity by the merest glimpse of what lies in the shadows of our world.

Lovecraft’s work, I think, not only reflects the long disillusionment of the Victorian Era, but also the violent horror of a civilisation come undone in the charnel houses of the First World War. What were a few cults or monsters compared to the vast armies of destruction that swept through the killing fields of Europe? Insanity might well be seen as a rational response to the violence that consumed the heart of the ‘civilised’ world.

Despair and violence – but these two elements alone are not enough to explain Lovecraft’s unique vision. There is also the rabid fear and loathing of the Other that pervades his work.

Examples of Lovecraft’s bigotry are legion both within and outside his stories – this is not to insult him, but only to acknowledge a plain fact. Lovecraft was a lonely, anxiety-ridden and fearful individual who saw vast swathes of humanity (the overwhelming majority, in fact) as subhuman races tending to bestial degeneration.

In such a moral universe human solidarity becomes impossible. Isolation is a necessity, if only for self-preservation.

So, despair, violence and isolation driven by fear and hatred – but there is one more vitally important element in Lovecraft that is integral to his philosophy of Cosmic Pessimism and Horror; his mysticism.

For there has always been a strong spiritual element to Lovecraft. The man himself wrote in his essay Supernatural Horror in Literature that “…man’s very hereditary essence has become saturated with religion and superstition. That saturation must, as a matter of plain scientific fact, be regarded as virtually permanent (emphasis my own)…”. There is no getting away from it – no matter our scientific or intellectual progress, we will remain the same frightened children we were at the dawn of our species.

And Man is a spiritual animal, according to Lovecraft. And so it follows that any Weird Tale that does not include, in some measure, the Supernatural cannot be properly so-called – it needs the “…essential mysticism, which marks the acutest form of the weird…”. Essential mysticism – striking words coming from a thorough-going materialist.

And what kind of mysticism is this? The Revelations of Divine Love of Julian of Norwich? Buddha under the Bodhi tree? Traherne’s Centuries? Of course not. This is the mysticism of the Witches Sabbath. Of the blood-drenched sacred groves of the Druidic and Teutonic pagans. A mysticism of darkness and fear– of “…contact with unknown spheres and powers; a subtle attitude of awed listening, as if for the beating of black wings or the scratching of outside shapes and entities on the known universe’s utmost rim.”

This is what gives Lovecraft’s stories their enduring power – that vital element of a Cosmic Pessimism that not only dethrones man but hints at unearthly Powers utterly beyond our comprehension, understanding or appeal.

Lovecraft’s work has no place for the holy symbol that wards off the vampire, the priest that exorcises the demon or any appearance of traditional divine agents such as angels. But I, along with many religious readers, still find some strange comfort in his work. Why is this?

I think it’s because Lovecraft’s vision remains, at heart, a spiritual one. A horrific vision, to be sure, but a spiritual vision nonetheless, and one that offers a kind of backhanded compliment to traditional believers:

In a Lovecraftian universe, God is absent. And what this absence reveals is not man throwing off centuries of dogma and rising to new heights of civilisation, reason and freedom, but rather his true condition – as a pointless, pitiful and ignorant accident of nature, totally at the mercy of dark and ravenous forces he can never hope to understand. Forces that we can only hope live in ignorance of our existence.

God is dead? Perhaps, according to Lovecraft. But the Great Old Ones live still.

Harry Piper is the author of The Great Die Slow and Other Tales of Dark Adventure, a collection of stories that mix heroic fantasy with cosmic horror. Set in a Dark Age Celtic landscape shrouded in myth and legend, these dark, often tragic, tales tell stories of ordinary men and women confronted by evil both human and inhuman.