Providence 4: Lovecraft Out of Bounds

The communal play that defined the early growth of Lovecraft’s myth-cycle is often celebrated as a pioneering experiment in collaborative fiction. Yet, from a hauntological perspective, it represents the precise mechanism of the canon’s undoing. By actively inviting his inner circle of correspondents to borrow his fictional books, locations, and entities, Lovecraft created a shared world that was inherently unstable, decentralised, and resistant to codification. This was an open-source architecture of the weird, where a mention of the Necronomicon in a story by Clark Ashton Smith or a reference to Tsathoggua in a tale of Arkham served to deepen the linguistic illusion of a vast, unreadable reality. The power of this shared space rested entirely on its fragmented, non-systematic nature. The entities were not deities in a cosmic court; they were merely anomalous data points flashing across the margins of separate narratives, suggesting a universe too chaotic to be organised by human reason.

This entire strategy of constructing an artificial, shared reality was ignited by Lovecraft’s intense engagement with the work of Lord Dunsany. When Lovecraft discovered Dunsany’s writing in 1919, it acted as an aesthetic revelation, fundamentally shifting his approach to supernatural literature. In collections like The Gods of Pegāna, Dunsany did not merely write ghost stories; he fabricated an entire, self-contained cosmology from scratch, complete with its own synthetic folklore, artificial deities like Mana-Yood-Sushai, and a highly stylised, pseudo-biblical prose style. Dunsany showed Lovecraft that an author could achieve an immense sense of depth by treating an invented mythology as if it were an established, historical fact.

Crucially, Dunsany’s universe operated on an internal, shared ledger where characters and gods drifted freely between otherwise disconnected tales, creating the illusion of a grand, cohesive tapestry just out of the reader’s sight. Lovecraft took this mechanism of the artificial pantheon but stripped it of Dunsany’s whimsical, fairy-tale irony, infusing it instead with his own brand of materialistic despair. The dream-like gods of Pegāna mutated into the indifferent, biological horrors of the myth-cycle. By the time Lovecraft began sharing his toys with his correspondents, the foundational lesson of Dunsany had been fully absorbed: the ultimate way to make the weird believable was to embed it within a shared, expanding historical record that bypassed real-world mythologies entirely.

To understand the true nature of this living text, one must look at the specific, horizontal interactions between Lovecraft and his closest peers, particularly Clark Ashton Smith and Robert E. Howard. This was not a modern writer’s room working from a shared series bible, but a fluid exchange of high-literary jokes and aesthetic provocations conducted via the postal service. When Clark Ashton Smith introduced the furry, toad-like entity Tsathoggua or the pre-human continent of Hyperborea, he was operating with a distinct sense of cosmic irony and decadent style. Smith’s contributions were deeply rooted in his background as a poet; his landscapes were lush, weary, and saturated with a sense of immense temporal distance. Lovecraft did not receive these elements as rules to be codified, but as linguistic toys. He delighted in dropping Tsathoggua into the subterranean history of The Mound or referencing the Book of Eibon alongside his own Necronomicon precisely because Smith’s creations shared his obsession with deep time, while remaining completely free from any conventional moral scaffolding.

This playful textuality is explicitly visible in the way Lovecraft and Smith weaponised their false citations. The Book of Eibon did not exist as a fixed narrative text; it existed as a series of fragmented gestures, an artefact whose content shifted depending on who invoked it. For Smith, it was a chronicle of the sorcerers of a dying, ice-choked world. For Lovecraft, it was another volume to place on the shelves of Miskatonic University to induce epistemic panic in a rationalist professor. By treating each other’s creations with a casual irreverence, they prevented the myth-cycle from ever hardening into a dogmatic system. The shared world was a hall of mirrors where every citation pointed to another text that was also a fiction, creating an endless loop of bibliographic trickery that subverted the reader’s desire for a stable, coherent reality.

This subversion of the researcher’s safety offers a striking point of contrast with the scholarly misadventures found in the ghost stories of M.R. James. At first glance, James’s antiquarian world seems benign, almost cosy, when placed alongside Lovecraft’s cosmic nihilism. James’s protagonists are similarly fastidious scholars, cataloguers, and church historians who spend their lives in the quiet dust of cathedral libraries or provincial auctions. However, the nature of their academic failure strikes at the very nature of existence. For a Jamesian protagonist, the archive is a stable, historically cohesive container that happens to hold a localised trap. When the academic in Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad or The Treasure of Abbot Thomas unearths a bronze whistle or decodes a cryptogram in a stained-glass window, they are violating a specific, historically bounded prohibition. The horror that pursues them is not a formless, pre-human cosmic force, but a punitive agent of the past, a highly personalised guardian enforcing a boundary of property, religion, or grave rest.

The Jamesian scholar suffers because of a personal character flaw, usually a smug, rationalistic curiosity or a lack of spiritual reverence. The haunting is a moral correction. Once the artefact is buried again or the lesson is learned, the status quo of human history is fully restored. Lovecraft, however, strips the archive of any such moral or protective boundaries. When Wilmarth or Armitage dig into the Book of Eibon, they are not waking a ghost that can be exorcised by a clergyman or returned to a tomb. They are discovering that human reason itself is an illusion, a fragile crust over a reality that views their entire species as irrelevant data. Where James uses the archive as a site of historical transgression, Lovecraft uses it as a site of total cosmic eviction.

A completely different but equally vital dynamic occurred in the exchange between Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard. The Texan writer did not approach the myth-cycle through the lens of decadent irony, but through a grim, materialist philosophy of history. Howard’s contributions, such as Friedrich von Junzt’s Unaussprechlichen Kulten or the sinister Bran Cults, were deployed to reinforce his own themes of civilizational collapse and primordial barbarism. When Howard dropped references to Cthulhu or Yog-Sothoth into his historical fantasies, he was not trying to build a pantheon; he was using Lovecraft’s cosmic scale to suggest that human empires are merely brief, insignificant spasms between vast ages of darkness. Lovecraft, in turn, adopted Howard’s ancient history, integrating the pre-human kingdoms of Valusia and the degenerate serpent men into his own archaeological horrors. This was a dialogue of shared anxieties, where the vastness of the cosmos met the violence of the frontier, held together entirely by a mutual belief that progress is a fragile lie.

The fundamental tragedy of this collaborative project began almost immediately after Lovecraft’s death, driven by the programmatic and profoundly misguided editorial ambitions of August Derleth. Through the founding of Arkham House, Derleth performed a retroactive domestic conversion on a universe that had been explicitly built to evict the human subject. Derleth took a fragmented linguistic collage and forced it into a structured, rational system, inventing the very term Cthulhu Mythos to describe a pantheon that Lovecraft had deliberately left fluid and unclassifiable. This was a profound act of generic violence. Derleth looked at a cosmic vacuum and felt a desperate need to populate it with a familiar, reassuring architecture of good and evil, systematically rewriting Lovecraft’s cosmic indifference into a standard melodrama of elemental forces.

In doing so, Derleth committed a massive critical error by misinterpreting the very nature of the literary game Lovecraft had been playing with Smith and Howard. Where the living authors had used collaborative borrowing to scatter authority and dissolve the boundaries of the text, Derleth used his position as literary executor to centralise authority and erect rigid boundaries. He treated casual, epistolary jests as binding canonical law. If Lovecraft had jokingly referred to a monster as a cousin of Cthulhu in a letter to a friend, Derleth noted it down, filed it away, and built a pseudo-genealogical chart around it. He replaced the vast, unreadable void of the original circle with the pedantic, bureaucratic bookkeeping of a fan-driven database, effectively killing the weirdness of the work to make it manageable.

This codification reached its lowest point when Derleth forced the Old Ones into a binary, Judeo-Christian moral framework disguised as a dualistic conflict between elemental spirits. In Derleth’s expanded universe, the entities were split into warring camps of earth, air, fire, and water, overseen by the benevolent Elder Gods who supposedly protected humanity from the malice of the Great Old Ones. This elemental typing was not only textually absurd, such as classifying Cthulhu, a cosmic entity trapped in a sunken city, as a water elemental who could be thwarted by air spirits, but it fundamentally castrates the existential dread of the original texts. Lovecraft’s horror relies entirely on the fact that the entities are completely indifferent to humanity, viewing our species as little more than a biological accident. Derleth, unable to tolerate this absolute void, reintroduced the human subject as the central prize in a cosmic war, turning a terrifyingly alien cosmos back into a comforting Sunday school lesson.

The most egregious tool in this moral sanitisation was Derleth’s distortion of the Elder Sign. In Lovecraft’s original conception, the Elder Sign was a minor, defensive gesture, a temporary and highly unreliable psychological shield used by fragile humans to ward off localised anomalies. It carried no moral weight and offered no ultimate salvation. Derleth, however, transformed the Elder Sign into a cosmic crucifix. In his stories, human protagonists wield the symbol like a piece of church silver, using it to banish deep ones, repel shoggoths, and send ancient cosmic horrors fleeing into the shadows. This mechanical device completely erases the existential panic of realising that human morality is an evolutionary fluke. The Elder Sign becomes a literal magic wand that validates human agency, reassuring the reader that as long as they hold the correct occult talisman, the universe remains a rational place governed by protective spiritual laws.

This systematic corruption extends to the way Derleth processed Lovecraft’s fragmented notes into posthumous collaborations. Stories like The Lurker at the Threshold or The Gable Window were marketed as genuine joint efforts, yet they function as editorial skin-walking. Derleth took rough atmospheric fragments and forced them to run on his own pedestrian, plot-driven software. Where Lovecraft used language to build a defensive fortress against a changing world, Derleth used language to build a marketable brand. He turned the forbidden archive from a source of epistemic infection into a clean checklist of lore for fans to catalogue. The fake books and non-Euclidean angles that were once designed to suggest an unreadable cosmic abyss were systematically broken down into intellectual assets, stripped of their mystery, and organised into an encyclopaedic sandbox that lay open for comfortable consumer exploitation.