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Review of "The Curious Case of H. P. Lovecraft" by Paul Roland

11/13/2014

26 Comments

 
The Curious Case of H. P. Lovecraft
Paul Roland | Plexus, 2014 | 240 pages | $19.95

Paul Roland is a singer, and author, and a believer in the paranormal. He has written more than forty books, many of which cover subjects related to the occult, the Nazis, and psychic phenomena. He is also the author of a new biography of H. P. Lovecraft entitled The Curious Case of H. P. Lovecraft. The publisher sent me a review copy of the book, which I read with bafflement. It is the most unnecessary and uninformative Lovecraft book I’ve ever read, and I read Donald Tyson’s Dream World of H. P. Lovecraft back in 2010.
Some biographies—and here I recall Plutarch’s Lives and Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson--rise to become literature themselves. But if an author wishes to write of the interior life of a wordsmith but brings to the task nothing of literature and nothing original, what purpose does the resulting pile of words serve? This volume is less a biography than a love letter, but one stretched beyond its borders and far beyond the author’s limited literary talent.

I’d like to start with the book’s formal problems since those are the easiest to acknowledge and dispense with. The book is haphazard and unscholarly, not just in content but also in form. The editing is slipshod, and capitalization inconsistent. Most facts and quotations lack citation or documentation, but at random intervals—when a particular quotation must be acknowledged to the secondary source whence it came—Roland includes a parenthetical reference. Turning to the bibliography, it is a shocking disappointment. It is composed almost entirely of standard sources, largely secondary literature on Lovecraft, including several volumes by S. T. Joshi. Lovecraft’s works themselves are cited only to the internet, and in an unscholarly free website. Worse, the bibliography betrays no context: There are no works cited on New York or Providence, on Poe or Robert E. Howard. There are no works of literary theory, or on the Roaring Twenties or the Depression—or even on pulp magazines or weird fiction. How can one write about the life of a man without researching his times? The secondhand research gives the entire book a secondhand feel, more book report than book.

The purpose of this book is similarly uncertain. For whom is it written? Who would want to read a summary of other people’s work with little original insight? There is no through-line, no narrative, and no argument. Aside from almost (but not quite) endorsing the theory that Lovecraft was a “latent homosexual” (“we’ll never know”), the author has one somewhat original observation: that Lovecraft suffered from Asperger’s syndrome. But lacking the courage to make this a guiding framework for a sustained argument (he falls back instead on L. Sprague de Camp’s Freudian theories), and, frankly, lacking any research into Asperger’s beyond a quick Google search, this is never more than an occasional, if repeated, aside. It’s a shame since structuring a biography and literary analysis around an argument would have made this book ten times more interesting than its rehash of secondary material. I wonder if the title of the book was meant to recall The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, the novel about an autistic youth. I hesitate to ascribe to the book that level of self-awareness since Roland previously wrote another book using the Curious Case of... title format.

The author further seems to assume that the reader has already read Joshi’s biography, or is at least familiar with Lovecraft’s life. Names—August Derleth, Frank Belknap Long, Samuel Loveman—go by largely unexplained; major events are alluded to only in passing. The Cthulhu Mythos is unartfully explained in a parenthetical aside, out of sequence, in a chapter on Lovecraft’s pre-“Call of Cthulhu” fiction.

The overall tone of the book is of summary and pastiche. The author makes no effort to hide the fact that virtually all of the facts related in the volume derive from S. T. Joshi’s biography of Lovecraft, which is cited, haphazardly, in its two-volume form, I Am Providence. The second most important source is Donald Tyson’s The Dream World of H. P. Lovecraft, itself founded on Joshi, from which our author has borrowed the unsupportable conceit—proposed first by Kenneth Grant—that Lovecraft had a secret subconscious connection to supernatural powers from the realms beyond our reality. Roland does not endorse this view wholesale (though he says Lovecraft entered a “trance” when writing), but he speaks of it approvingly, and it forms the foundation for his emphasis on the importance of dreams, the occult, archetypes, and the subconscious in understanding Lovecraft’s fiction.

The book never really decides whether it is intended as a biography or a story-by-story criticism of Lovecraft’s fiction; it is not critical enough to be a literary biography, and it is not interesting enough or informative enough to serve as a life story. It occupies an uncertain middle ground where the purpose and audience seem vague.

If the volume lacks a certain depth, it is because the author has focused so closely on the specific works of Lovecraft’s oeuvre that he has failed to provide any such thing as context. As a result, the reader would be forgiven for thinking that Lovecraft had invented the modern horror story ex nihilo, based on little more than Edgar Allan Poe and Lord Dunsany. Worse, the reader gets the distinct impression—born from the author’s unfortunate adjectives—that Stephen King is a greater horror writer than Lovecraft! But to understand Lovecraft’s literature, one must understand the literary tradition on which Lovecraft drew and, equally important, the current state of horror fiction in the years when Lovecraft began to publish. Almost no word escapes the author’s lips on the types of weird tales populating pulp fiction in the years when Lovecraft was starting his career (except to condemn them), nor does the author discuss the content of the magazines and newspapers Lovecraft read and, in amateur fashion, contributed essays and stories to.

The result is that Roland tries too hard to force Lovecraft’s stories into modern subgenres, seeing Lovecraft’s work as much less unified in theme and mood than it was. A fragment called “Memory” he ascribes to “alternative timeline” fiction, when it is quite clearly meant as an allegorical fantasy. To the minor tale “Old Bugs” the author ascribes a truly outsized importance. So wonderful was it that he believes that more stories in that vein would have made Lovecraft famous in the 1920s, on par with Ogden Nash: “He would have avoided the penury that plagued him in later life and might even have saved his marriage, if that had been his wish.” If such success eluded more mainstream aspirants to literary honor, like Paul Rhymer, who eventually found fame as a radio writer after seeing his efforts at literary short fiction published to no notice, it would have been unlikely to descend on Lovecraft outside the horror genre. Again, context matters in making such judgments. Roland’s critical judgment is of course questionable since he considers Lovecraft’s best work to be “The Dunwich Horror” (1928), “one of the most original and imaginative works in the entire horror canon.”

The author duly notes Lovecraft’s racism, but he sees it only in its most explicit forms; he fails, for example, to find anything untoward about “Arthur Jermyn” (1920), a story in which the Anglo-Saxon title character kills himself when he realizes he is tainted by African blood. But the author similarly has failed to do his background research—another result of the lack of context—and also makes some mistakes about the context Lovecraft drew upon. He claims, for example, that Lovecraft found a description of Iram, city of pillars, in the Qur’an. While the destruction of the city is referenced in the Qur’an, a description of the city can only be found in the source Lovecraft was more familiar with: The Arabian Nights. He also falsely calls the Kraken a “Greek myth,” which mistake must derive from Clash of the Titans. They are tiny errors, but they accumulate over the course of the book and contribute to the sense that it was assembled secondhand.

The latter sections of the book are little more than plot summaries of Lovecraft’s stories, and the only event of his later life described in any detail is his death, perversely given more space than any other biographical element. A final chapter on Lovecraft’s work is an incoherent agglutination of literary criticism on largely unrelated topics that reads like sections of earlier chapters that didn’t quite fit and were amputated and reassembled into a Frankenstein’s monster of a conclusion. The Asperger’s diagnosis makes an odd reappearance only to be dropped in favor of a explication of Lovecraft’s literary style and a further defense of the position, derived from Tyson and Grant, that Lovecraft had an accidental connection to the supernatural through dream visions of other dimensions: “Had he studied theosophy or any other spiritual discipline rather than dismissing them out of hand, he would have discovered that what he assumed to be a sense of insignificance was instead an awareness of being an infinitesimal but vital part of a greater reality.”

Remarkably, after running out of literary works and biography and then criticism, the book nonetheless continues on to a chapter on adaptations of Lovecraft’s work. This is a bit confusing because the book has now had two endings, and the next chapter picks up forty years after Lovecraft’s death without a moment’s thought about the literary effort that kept Lovecraft’s work alive for filmmakers to rediscover it. This chapter on adaptations has no narrative or through-line; instead it breaks down into spotty hit-and-run commentaries on film, comics, television, music, games, etc., with long lists of recommended reading and viewing.

Stranger still: This chapter, which feels like an appendix, is followed by an afterward, making the third or fourth consecutive ending for the book. Here, the author loops back to Lovecraft’s death to trace the publication history of his work and its critical reception, which logically ought to have come before the preceding chapter. It is placed here because it runs only a few paragraphs. The book concludes with a series of appendices, including Lovecraft’s “History of the Necronomicon,” his “Notes on Writing Weird Fiction,” and his wife Sonia Greene’s memoir of him. The last of these is reproduced from the abridged 1948 Providence Journal printing, rather than the unabridged version published by Necronomicon Press. Press materials describe the memoir as an “exclusive” to the book, but it’s not just in the Necronomicon Press edition (1985) but also August Derleth’s Something about Cats (1949, 1971). It’s more accurate to say it’s the exclusive version currently in print.

Everything you’ve read so far I wrote while reading the book over the past week. However, I need to inform readers of some unsolicited contact I had with the author this morning, after I had completed my review. My having contact with the author before my review runs is generally considered inappropriate for a book reviewer, as it runs the risk of compromising the reviewer’s objectivity. To be clear, though: At no time did anyone a Plexus nor the author attempt to influence my review, or indeed have any idea what I was writing.

Yesterday, the publicist for Plexus contacted me to follow up on whether I planned to review the book. He asked what I thought of it, and like most journalists I declined to provide a prepublication preview of the content of my review. I did, however, share my general concerns about the reason for publishing the book (I phrased in the form of asking what I was missing about the purpose of the book) and who the perceived audience for it might be since it appeared to be wholly unoriginal and quite derivative of Joshi’s and Tyson’s books. I meant that only as a comment on Plexus’s choice to publish the book, but the publicist felt they would better be answered by Roland, who responded through the publicist this morning. He more or less confirmed all of my criticisms:
The primary purpose of the book was to provide a comprehensive and concise biography and assessment of a writer many people are fascinated by but know little about. The Joshi book has been criticised for being convoluted and indulgent – the two volumes having added 150,000 EXTRA words of Joshi’s personal interests and observations on what many readers consider superfluous or extraneous information (Amazon reviews are particularly critical in this respect). My book is aimed primarily but not exclusively at the ‘general readers’ who may have a serious interest in horror fiction but who do not wish to commit themselves to ploughing through 2000 + pages of Joshi’s 2 volume door-stopper or investing £30 in them.
The publicist added that the book’s appendices contained a “wealth” of “rare” material, though as I noted above, all of it has been published repeatedly for decades and is readily available at many large libraries. You can take as you will the assertion that Roland’s book is either comprehensive or a biography in the traditional sense.

My bottom line remains unchanged: A new biography of Lovecraft for general readers would be a welcome addition, but this one lacks the original research, factual information, and overarching structure to make it understandable to those who have not read Joshi, or worthwhile to those who have.
26 Comments
Mandalore
11/13/2014 03:15:31 am

Ouch.

Reply
spookyparadigm
11/13/2014 03:23:54 am

Have class so I'll have to read this later. But I saw the first paragraph, and would have to ask: have you read, or at least looked at, Curran's book?

Reply
Jason Colavito link
11/13/2014 03:49:03 am

I haven't, but I've heard terrible things about it.

Reply
spookyparadigm
11/13/2014 06:04:00 am

You might find it fascinating, if nothing else for how people have taken Harms' Encyclopedia.

Kal
11/13/2014 05:26:43 am

Just because Lovecraft had characters similar to autistic doesn't mean he had it. This author merely googled the phrase and went from there. Lovecraft was probably obsessive compulsive, similar but not on the spectrum, but did not have Aspergers. Not everyone has it just because it's now trendy. He was never diagnosed with autism. The google search of this is chuck full of hearsay which ended up in this book your reviewed.

It would not bode well for Asperger people to be associated with Lovecraft, who like many of his generation were at least up front prejudiced if not racist. Look at all the old movies and serials of the time. People had no problem making stereotyped characters out of other people. It was kind of disturbing.

The only thing that connects King to Lovecraft is that King was heavily influenced by his works. Maybe authors were.

And above all, as a journalism grad from not too long ago, you do not use google as a source! What publisher is this? How does he allow this person to do it? Maybe he is a self published author, but he should at least say he is.

The book seems more an editorial on Lovecraft than an actual historical account.

Herein lies a similarity to ancient aleins and all those shows. They are not history. They should be on the scifi channel because they're fiction. Fiction is fine off the History channel, on the fantasy channels where it belongs.

Reply
Kal
11/13/2014 05:28:46 am

I sure made a lot of typos. Oh well.

Reply
Jason Colavito link
11/13/2014 06:25:54 am

Just to be clear: I don't know what his source for the Asperger's information was; I meant only that it was superficial, encyclopedia-style information. He did not actually cite any source at all.

Reply
EP
11/13/2014 06:30:20 am

A non-psychiatrist attributing a diagnostically obsolete condition to a spottily documented historical figure? Without following proper scholarly procedure? I'm in a state of shock! :)

Residents Fan
11/14/2014 08:51:42 am

This book sounds awful. Looks like Jason helped Lovecraft
enthusiasts dodge a bullet here!

I've heard it repeatedly suggested online that Lovecraft might have
high functioning autism, but this seems to be the first time
an actual Lovecraft study suggest it. I would be careful
about attributing autism to someone unless someone familiar with
psychology was able to study their life in detail (I wonder if
if Dirk W. Mosig, who studied psychology, has ever suggested
it? )

EP
11/13/2014 06:10:50 am

Roland should stick to his usual fare of "How to Drive Nazi Babes Wild in Bed" or "Inside Jack the Ripper's Sex Cult" or whatever...

Reply
spookyparadigm
11/13/2014 06:13:49 am

Is the website he cites for the stories Dagonbytes? Because if it is hplovecraft.com I think it is legit to cite that. The works are in public domain, those are the corrected texts, and given how many different fly-by-night collections have been pubished, I think it is the closest there is to a standard collection at this point.

I'm not going to comment on this volume, I haven't seen it. But if you think this is bad, you really ought to seek out the Curran. It is something else.

Reply
Clint Knapp
11/13/2014 06:19:32 am

Ha! Dagonbytes is exactly what I was thinking when I read that line. It would seem to fit the author's reliance on the occult fascination with Lovecraft, at any rate.

Reply
Jason Colavito link
11/13/2014 06:25:01 am

It was Dagonbytes.

Reply
EP
11/13/2014 06:46:07 am

I would have thought the Library of America volume would be the standard collection - it is, like, the *opposite* of fly-by-night. Though I guess it omits too much stuff...

Reply
spookyparadigm
11/13/2014 08:33:18 am

Loucks' site has all the material, it is freely available on the internet, its the Joshi-corrected material, and there is other ephemera there. I don't see any point in privileging any harder-to-obtain paper version under those circumstances.

EP
11/13/2014 08:55:47 am

I agree, that site is awesome. It's what I use whenever I want to look up something from Lovecraft. I'm not going to pretend that I checked the accuracy of the texts, however, and while I'm sure it's quite accurate I'm equally sure that the Library of America is more reliable.

W. H. Pugmire link
11/13/2014 08:12:00 am

I had the book on pre-order, but then deleted my order the more I read about the book; & you and other reviews have made me very happy that I didn't waste any money on it. It cannot be as bad as Bob Curren's pathetic piece of garbage, but it sounds (from your excellent review and one other I saw on Amazon) that the project was far beyond Roland's capabilities.

The finest one-volume edition of E'ch-Pi-El is THE COMPLETE FICTION from Barnes & Noble. THE NEW ANNOTATED H. P. LOVECRAFT is a magnificent edition, but offers only 22 tales.

Reply
Residents Fan
11/14/2014 09:05:20 am

Well, since we're on the subject of book recommendations,
" Bewilderments of Vision :Hallucination and Literature, 1880–1914"
by Oliver Tearle is a new study of hallucination in the supernatural
fiction of Henry James, Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur
Machen Vernon Lee and Oliver Onions. It's already been praised by
Gary William Crawford, and seems worth a look
for scholars of the field (especially
for the fact that there has been little study of Oliver Onions'
work compared to the other four authors covered it BoW).

Reply
Shane Sullivan
11/13/2014 11:52:32 am

"instead it breaks down into spotty hit-and-run commentaries on film, comics, television, music, games, etc., with long lists of recommended reading and viewing."

Speaking of music, I recently read Nyarlathotep for the first time, and I noticed Dream Theater's "Dark Eternal Night" is based on the story. I always thought the song's imagery--endless stairs, grotesque creatures amidst fallen ruins, "yellow evil faces"--sounded like Lovecraft stock, but until now, it was just a hunch.

I apologize if this is off-topic.

Reply
EP
11/13/2014 12:08:40 pm

Jason, every time you mention Asperger's, "." shows up. No exceptions. Like it's a law of nature :)

While there certainly is room for respectful disagreement on this issue, I find attempts to diagnose mental problems of historical figures from the armchair to be rather distasteful. In any case, they almost invariably amount to idle, exploitative speculation. Even when it's Freud on Dostoevsky. And if even Freud can't do it right, what hope do the likes of Roland have?

Reply
Jason Colavito link
11/13/2014 12:51:24 pm

Roland only mentioned the idea a few times in the book; as I noted, it's subsumed beneath De Camp's Freudian readings of Lovecraft's ruination due to over-mothering. My point wasn't to argue that Lovecraft had autism--diagnosing people across time is obviously a fool's errand--but to suggest that Roland's book would have benefited from having an argument. Tyson's book, for all its manifold flaws, benefits from having an argument, albeit a stupid one: that Lovecraft's dreams gave him secret access to the spirit world.

Reply
EP
11/13/2014 01:31:12 pm

Oh, I absolutely didn't mean to imply that you were engaging in this practice! I hope that nothing in my post suggests otherwise.

Kal
11/13/2014 12:44:04 pm

I also found the lists that the above posters did, although when you go there some of them link back to an autistic person who just thinks they have it. Hardly conclusive. Other sources and commentaries wrongly list various celebrities also, but are clearly confused. Nobody at the time diagnosed Lovecraft or Poe. It is just 'armchair psychology' as someone above said.

They are confusing creative people who were socially awkward with those on the spectrum. They are also confusing attention deficit and obsessive compulsive with the spectrum. ADD is really the opposite of autism. An ADD person cannot concentrate on things and switches constantly. An autistic person can focus on mundane details for hours. An OCD person can focus also, but cannot stop.

Lovecraft wasn't on the spectrum just because someone said it on the internet. It is evidenced from his bibliographical data that both his parents had mental illness and at least one was bipolar. It is possible he inherited this from either one of his parents. He did have a social life even if he later died a pauper. It doesn't sound like autism spectrum at all, but likely could be manic depressive, which would account for the stories being so vivid and twisted at times. Then again there is only documentation of his parents' illnesses, not his. That would be enough to mess with his mind. Maybe there is more on that just because there were records of them being institutionalized.

Autism is not a mental illness but a cognitive dysfunction where the social cues and nonverbal cues of others become muddled trying to be processed in the brain. It's a wiring problem not a condition. They become very good at certain subjects. Some may excel at math or at writing, but be deficient on socialization. Also people with ADD and OCD might have the same social problems.

If he had friends and worked on a magazine he probably did understand social cues and such, so that's out as a possible factor.
A lot of people in his day did that. It was different then. People didn't have an instant means to communicate over incredible distances instantly. They used letters and telephone when they could get around to it. The 20s were not like today. Maybe people died poor then.


Reply
EP
11/13/2014 01:38:22 pm

"ADD is really the opposite of autism."

Kal, I'm sorry, but that is simply false. In fact, not only is it possible to have both, but there may even be some comorbidity involved:

http://psychcentral.com/news/2013/10/18/adhd-kids-often-show-autistic-traits/60851.html

Reply
Kal
11/14/2014 04:00:41 am

Attention deficit and hyperactive disorder is different from mere attention deficit disorder and you know it, or can google it as you have here. Lovecraft was never diagnosed, couldn't have been, and is likely closer to bipolar, so your argument is moot.

The hyperactive part leads to the 'autistic traits' not the other way around. Both will have poor social skills, motivation, concentration, but the difference is that kids on the spectrum have much more focus and concentration.

That is why it is a spectrum not a line in the sand. It is like an em spectrum with varying degrees.

Since I am on the spectrum, I find your comments somewhat more puzzling than insulting. I was never diagnosed with ADHD, but know several people who have it and we get along because whereas they have trouble focusing, I don't.

Lovecraft did not have autism, in my opinion. Get over it.

Autism and ADD are kinda opposite, in my opinion.

Reply
EP
11/14/2014 05:11:14 am

I guess I should have made it clear that the link was just meant as an example. In any case, ADD is now considered a type of ADHD.

I'm not sure on what basis you're making claims about what leads to what. Even psychiatrists who study these things don't make such strong causal generalizations. Either one may contribute to the other, and the two may have common underlying causes.

Lots of people with ADD are capable of excellent focus and concentration (in fact, they are known to "hyper-focus"). It is difficulty with attending to a task continuously (or deliberately/systematically) that is the problem.

I'm not sure who you think is arguing that Lovecraft had autism, when everyone posting in the thread so far has been dismissive of Roland's suggestion that he might have. But nothing I said to you or anyone else makes an argument to that effect, so I'm not sure what you're objecting to.

I don't know why anyone on or off any spectrum would find factual disagreement insulting, and I won't make jokes about finding it puzzling :)

Reply



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