A LOVECRAFTIAN SEGUE

The following quote was taken from a letter written by H.P. Lovecraft to the pulp magazine ALL-STORY. This excerpt appeared in an essay in the collection LOVECRAFT AND INFLUENCE, analyzing the influence of Edgar Rice Burroughs on the Providence author. In his essay "A Reprehensible Habit," Gavin Callaghan did not elaborate on the context of the letter, except insofar as it illustrated his thesis, and the ellipses in the excerpt are presumably Callaghan's.

If. in fact, man is unable to create living things out of inorganic matter. to hypnotize the beasts of the forest to do his will, to swing from tree to tree with the apes of the African jungle...or to explore... the deserts of Mars, permit us, at least, in fantasy, to witness these miracles, and to satisfy that craving for the unknown, the weird, and the impossible which exists in every human brain.

Though Burroughs' name is not mentioned, the references to Tarzan are unmistakable, and it's likely that the part about creating creatures from inorganic matter alludes to ERB's 1927 Mars-novel THE MASTER MIND OF MARS. What's more significant to me and my NUM formula, though, is that HPL speaks of the uncanny feats of Tarzan as being as much a "miracle" as the marvelous super-science of Mars. I find this intriguing because HPL himself wrote very little in the way of "uncanny" horror fiction, one exception being "The Picture in the House," a story of rural cannibalism. Almost everything he himself penned fit into his definition of "supernatural horror"-- though by this he didn't mean traditional ghosts and goblins, but usually his own unique take on super-science. My memory is that in his long essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature," HPL barely alludes to anything in the realm of the uncanny-- which would not be unusual, since by definition the uncanny does not include the genuinely supernatural-- not to mention anything "miraculous."

I've long maintained that the factor uniting the uncanny and the marvelous is the quality of "strangeness." I deduced this general law from the many examples of compendia of fantastic film that always include fearsome psychos alongside forbidden planets, fake ghosts alongside real ones, and so on-- a recent example reviewed here. But of course, long before there were any such compendia, pulp magazines like WEIRD TALES offered both uncanny and marvelous terrors to their readers. HPL's letter records the personal testimony of a fan who liked both types of weird fiction-- even if he himself concentrated on just one of the two in his own creative endeavor. 

On a side-note within this segue from the current "strangeness/unfamiliarity" essays, I would say that HPL didn't take many tropes from ERB, given the latter's emphasis on physical adventure and romance-- with one exception, for some of ERB's works are as fascinated with the concept of societal devolution as those of the Providence horror-meister.