Howard Phillips Lovecraft was a short story horror fiction writer, born in 1890 and died in 1937 (Halpern and Labossiere 512). His unique style of writing, “...follows a rather nontraditional approach to horror, fitting more appropriately into the sub-genre weird fiction” (Hull 10). Lovecraft’s stories feature many strange creatures from the unknown, such as Cthulhu, Hastur the Unspeakable, and Yog Sothoth (Kutrieh 44). These monsters, and the style of horror they were presented in, were a department from the traditional antagonists of horror stories at Lovecraft’s time, and for various reasons. H.P. Lovecraft’s style of horror defined itself through the use of higher dimensional beings, the cosmological insignificance of humanity, and
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For example, in the most well known Lovecraftian horror story, Call of Cthulhu, sailors stumble upon the city R’Lyeh, the residence of the creature Cthulhu. In R’Lyeh, the sailors noticed the architecture of the walls and buildings were of shapes beyond normal thought. There were endless abysses, lines that extended into the void, and the material the city was made of wasn’t of normal matter. The captain of the sailors had a man swept away by an angle, described as being acute yet acting like an obtuse angle (Hull 10-12). The mathematics of the 4th-Dimension are called “non-Euclidean”, because they do not follow the laws of logic …show more content…
Lovecraft, entropy, or the increasing of disorder in the universe, finally destroys our world. It is a clear example of how Lovecraft felt about time, and how its effects are inescapable (Engle). Another point in Lovecraftian horror that shows how small we really are is the grasp of the gods in Lovecraft’s stories. The external dimensional beings in the Lovecraftian universe know much more beyond anything humans could ever comprehend. The mathematics that the gods know is clearly above our understanding, as said earlier. The city of R’Lyeh was described by sailors as simply being impossible, and we, as small beings, cannot ever see what R’Lyeh’s true structure, for it is too big for us to understand. Our little grasp of the actual universe is what prevents us from ever knowing how reality ever works, and those who do understand it in Lovecraft’s tales go insane, as they cannot function normally when they find out even a fraction of the Elder God’s knowledge (Hull
For example, in the most well known Lovecraftian horror story, Call of Cthulhu, sailors stumble upon the city R’Lyeh, the residence of the creature Cthulhu. In R’Lyeh, the sailors noticed the architecture of the walls and buildings were of shapes beyond normal thought. There were endless abysses, lines that extended into the void, and the material the city was made of wasn’t of normal matter. The captain of the sailors had a man swept away by an angle, described as being acute yet acting like an obtuse angle (Hull 10-12). The mathematics of the 4th-Dimension are called “non-Euclidean”, because they do not follow the laws of logic …show more content…
Lovecraft, entropy, or the increasing of disorder in the universe, finally destroys our world. It is a clear example of how Lovecraft felt about time, and how its effects are inescapable (Engle). Another point in Lovecraftian horror that shows how small we really are is the grasp of the gods in Lovecraft’s stories. The external dimensional beings in the Lovecraftian universe know much more beyond anything humans could ever comprehend. The mathematics that the gods know is clearly above our understanding, as said earlier. The city of R’Lyeh was described by sailors as simply being impossible, and we, as small beings, cannot ever see what R’Lyeh’s true structure, for it is too big for us to understand. Our little grasp of the actual universe is what prevents us from ever knowing how reality ever works, and those who do understand it in Lovecraft’s tales go insane, as they cannot function normally when they find out even a fraction of the Elder God’s knowledge (Hull