Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890–1937) was, like that looming spectre of his written works, a master of the Weird, and his driving focus without a doubt was to whet his tools of Cosmicism, which had given rise to his hallmark style, one to which Genre savants of this modern-day might refer as “Lovecraftian Horror.” But Lovecraft’s writings are much closer to the Gothic, to a sort of foundational vein of Gothic Fiction, closer than has been attested to in bookish spheres of the mainstream, amongst the prosaic zeitgeist of modern society, in spheres of everyday pop culture, and perchance even in deeper literary circles. In pop culture, the focus usually seems to be that Lovecraft was a pioneer of Weird Fiction, a writer who eschewed the use of religion, magic, and the fantastical—replacing them with alien beings with access to sci-fi technology and alien laws, which act so beyond human understanding that they just might as well be “magic,” and phenomena that can be explained and visualized with science, even if the understanding brings madness. It certainly may be said that these are the qualities in Lovecraft’s works that brought him away from Gothic Fiction, for the Gothic is stereotyped as a literature of empathetic spells, irrational magic, monsters that conform to “reliable” historic folklore and religion, and forces that can be understood and conquered with love, religion, social morality, or a kind of mawkish combination of all three. Gothic Fiction, as it is known in a most universal way, works on principles that human beings—including readers and the characters within the stories—understand and have been taught all throughout their lives. The Gothic genre seems to balance itself, work itself, on this idea of transgressions and taboos that can be bested if the transgressors, victims, or protagonists know how to put wrong back to right. Natheless, is this all the worth of Gothic Fiction? Clichés, whimsical punctilios, and droll tropes and motifs that today share only a wink and a smirk betwixt author and reader?

Lovecraft, knowingly or not, has given fond reminder of what Gothic Fiction started as, always should have been, and is now slowly becoming anew, like a cadaver risen forth from its grave to achieve an eldritch ride across the dreaming mind. Is this to say that all Weird Fiction is inadvertently bearing Gothic Fiction, or that Weird Fiction is a branch, a mood, of Gothic Fiction, forever in link with the Gothic? Not all Horror Fiction is Gothic, but there is in sooth evidence to suggest that Lovecraft’s stories were always more Gothic than might have been surmised. Regardless of if this be no revelation, it is important to keep such things in mind if one is to better grasp and explore into the genres of Horror-craft, Sci-fi Fantasy, Gothic Fiction, Cosmic Horror, and Pulp Fiction. Mayhap, it might be easier to infer that this is but a singular issue chiefly kindred to Lovecraftian Horror. Lovecraft’s works, even though they point to the Weird, revitalize the core of Gothic Fiction and have returned it to its inescapable fundamentality: Gothic Horror. Lovecraft’s brilliant writing hales a draught of components from Fantasy and calls them into a reality of the modern and the material; and it is here that his stories create a claustrophobic, intimate terror akin to the psychological drama utilized by Gothic Fiction.

The baroque writings of Lovecraft are a bolt of Weird-Fiction genius, and they are also a veritable exalting of Gothic literature, going far beyond the misguided yet admirable achievements made far removed from the purest form of the Gothic genre. The smart works of Emily Jane Brontë (1818–1848) and Charlotte Brontë (1816–1855), the work of parody by Jane Austen (1775–1817), the noteworthy writings of Ann Radcliffe (1764–1823), and even that praiseworthy novel of reanimation by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797–1851) have only taken readers away from what is at the heart of the Gothic, that heart with which Lovecraft was able to connect time and time again in his writing: that horror of being treacherously near to the influences of the unescapable, of that which should be impossible, the unknowable, the unavoidable, and the transcendental numinous or uncanny—that which are secular, uncaring, or even at odds with the designs of puerile humankind. Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (Shelley, 1818); Wuthering Heights (Brontë, 1847); Northanger Abbey (Austen, 1817); The Italian, or the Confessional of the Black Penitents (Radcliffe, 1797); and Jane Eyre (Brontë, 1847)—these works, whilst in addition to being respectable creations that forever have influenced Gothic literature and the very genres of the Gothic and the Horror-craft, they have misinterpreted, complicated, the genre of Gothicism by taking the genre itself into a sphere so remote from what makes Gothic work its guile best. While redefining the nature of the Sublime, these works have also removed their nature from the true nature of the Gothic. It is above peradventure that Gothic Fiction owes a grand lot to these works, but such writings have become something else, like a kind of doppelgänger effect, and they do not harness that raw, undisguised character belonging to Gothic Fiction. When it comes to such matters, those works must pale in comparison with the works of those who truly made the Gothic work to its fever pitch, at that nigh-unfathomable zenith wherein a triumvirate of horror, terror, and the uncanny sincerely wakes—that which was being built to perfection by Lovecraft and the minds of writers like Horace Walpole (1717–1797), Matthew Gregory Lewis (1775–1818), Abraham Stoker (1847–1912), John William Polidori (1795–1821), Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849), William Thomas Beckford (1760–1844), and Charles Robert Maturin (1780–1824). There is more to the Gothic, and it must be more, than Byronic bad boys betwixt cloying sociopolitical commentary and morality-carping.

Magic, ghosts, and benevolent powers fighting against “evil”—these trappings need not be in a Gothic tale. One can assuredly write a Gothic story with all the fury of curses and unexplainable entities that rend the sanity of the human mind, without using ridiculous ghosts or absurd magic or overly fantastical myths, without needing to suspend disbelief with silly humbug. Lovecraft appears to have triumphed by avoiding such humbug in many of his works, and his Gothicism can be seen through the copious amounts of Gothic elements adjusted into his stories. Weird Fiction and Gothic Fiction are more alike than they might at first appear. There is no one way to write a Gothic yarn. Lovecraft’s stories do hint, even though Lovecraft took his art far into Cosmicism, that the Gothic can be revived to an ultimate evolution. In a Lovecraftian story, characters are usually faced with that which cannot be avoided, insanity that cannot be reversed, knowledge that cannot be unlearned—this calamity makes the characters run against what had been repressed—a very Gothic occurrence.  

Lovecraft might have aimed to distance his writings from the Gothic genre, but what he created allowed the Gothic to embrace a type of paradoxical mad repose. His works keep Gothic genre elements alive, proving the Gothic goes beyond the supernatural. Like Weird Fiction, Gothicism can reach into the uncanny and bring readers the horror of insane realizations—the surrender to the impossible and the inevitable.

Matthew Pungitore graduated with a Bachelor of Science in English from Fitchburg State University. He volunteers with the Hingham Historical Society. The town of Hingham in Massachusetts is where he was brought up, and he has lived there for many years. Matthew is the author of The Report of Mr. Charles Aalmers and Other Stories, Fiendilkfjeld Castle, and Midnight's Eternal Prisoner: Waiting For The Summer.

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