Howard Phillips Lovecraft Essay

As a result of his curiosity about the universe, Howard Phillips Lovecraft also philosophized that the existence of the supernatural is a possibility because the infinite cosmos has yet to be explored in its entirety. The monsters and otherworldly beings that Lovecraft writes of are not gory and do not evoke feelings of shock, but they are more so are disturbing in the fact that they remain inexplicable. Through his own mythology, he developed a fictional universe of supernatural beings that transcend all barriers of time and space. Writer Jess Nevins observes Lovecraft’s use of otherworldly beings in his writings by expressing, “It was Lovecraft who first created a fictional universe that anyone was welcome to take part in. Both during his lifetime and …show more content…
As other writers added to or built off of Lovecraft’s universe, his ideas spread, resulting in the creation of a subgenre of horror fiction that is known as Lovecraftian horror. The most efficient way to recognize the use of Howard Phillips Lovecraft’s writing style is by searching for the incorporation of the beliefs of cosmicism: the absence of a god or the existence of the supernatural.
In such a grand universe, the presence of supernatural beings is a possibility that H.P. Lovecraft’s collection of short stories explore. Released in 1922, “The Music of Erich Zann” is a personal account of an unnamed student’s ominous experience of when he resided in an apartment on the street of Rue d’Auseil. Erich Zann, a mute old man who is a fellow tenant in the residency, plays haunting and strange melodies nightly on his viol, a musical instrument of the Renaissance and Baroque periods. The anonymous student discovers that Erich makes music to ward off the unknown evils that lurk outside his apartment window, which is seemingly a portal to another dimension. When the student looks out the window, he recalls, “I saw no city spread below, and