H.P. Lovecraft and the Evolution of Genre

Though I'd read some of his earlier, less overtly cosmic stories beforehand, it was the release of Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game in 1981 that ultimately cemented my lifelong affection for H.P. Lovecraft and his works. I doubt this is a unique situation. Indeed, I have long suspected that Call of Cthulhu has probably served as the gateway to Lovecraft for more people since its publication four decades ago than almost anything else. Consequently, on the 133rd anniversary of his birth, I wanted to use Call of Cthulhu as the springboard for some rambling thoughts on the changing meaning of literary genres and the question of the genre in which Lovecraft himself wrote.

If you take a look at the subtitle of the 1981 edition of Call of Cthulhu, you'll see that it reads "Fantasy Role-Playing in the Worlds of H.P. Lovecraft" – and so it remained for more than a decade, until the advent of the game's 1992 edition, when the subtitle became "Horror Roleplaying in the Worlds of H.P. Lovecraft." I remember being mildly baffled by this in my youth. I had assumed, based on my initially limited reading of HPL, that Call of Cthulhu would be a horror RPG. In what sense could the game be called fantasy? Bear in mind that, by the time of 1981, the term "fantasy" had already become strongly associated with stories that existed somewhere in that twilight realm located between Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and Howard's tales of Conan the Cimmerian. My bafflement stemmed from this fact.

With age, I've come to understand a couple of additional details that shed some light on this matter. First, in some corners of the hobby, particularly the West Coast but also in the UK, the term "fantasy roleplaying game" – or FRP – was a generic term. In this sense, a fantasy roleplaying game was a category of game, much like a boardgame or video game. Second, and probably relatedly, the term "fantasy" itself could still be used generically, applying very broadly to any fictional work that departs from everyday reality, in one way or another. As I already noted, this usage was not familiar to me in 1981, thanks in no small part to the success of marketers and bookstore managers in dividing and segregating the various strands of fantasy into fantasy proper, science fiction, horror, and so on. I suspect that the fine folks at Chaosium, being older fantasy fans, retained that earlier, broader sense of the term when they subtitled Call of Cthulhu.

But what about Lovecraft himself? How did he view the genre(s) in which he worked? Perhaps unsurprisingly, the matter is complicated. Obviously, Lovecraft lived the entirety of his life before there were any widely accepted distinctions between different types of speculative fiction. They were all still deemed varieties of "fantasy" and Lovecraft would occasionally talk about his work or those of others in his circle as "fantasies." He would, in fact, sometimes call himself a fantaïsiste, an archaic English word borrowed from French for both a dreamer and a creator of fantasies (Lord Dunsany being one of his models in this regard). 

At the same time, one of Lovecraft's most celebrated non-fiction writings is his 1927 essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature." In it, he surveyed the development and characteristics of a genre to which he gives various names – the "weirdly horrible tale," the "weird tale," the "literature of cosmic fear," "fear-literature," the "horror-tale," and more. HPL seemed to use the term "weird tale" most frequently to describe his own works, most of which were published, perhaps not coincidentally, in the pages of a magazine bearing the title Weird Tales. 

Does the weird tale constitute a genre – or perhaps sub-genre – of its own? Does it have unique characteristics distinct from those of other kinds of speculative fiction? These are good questions without clear answers. As is so often the case, whether one recognizes any answer as dispositive depends on how finely one wishes to slice a great mass of literature. Further, the fineness with which one can categorize literature is itself a product of historical context. It's only with the benefit of hindsight that one possesses sufficient numbers of categories to claim magisterially that, for example, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is a work of science fiction rather than fantasy. At the time the novel was written, such distinctions did not exist or, more importantly, did not matter. Even now, they have no impact whatsoever on one's enjoyment of Verne's tale.

To a great extent, that is also my judgment on the genre of H.P. Lovecraft's works: it doesn't matter. Whether one judges them fantasy, horror, or science fiction by the standards of today makes no difference to my own enjoyment of them. I increasingly feel as if this obsession with categorization, of putting everything into a clearly marked box, is folly – the pastime of pedants and advertising flacks. It's a defect of character to which I am particularly prone, which is why I feel it's important to push back against it. Ultimately, all that should matter is whether one finds a given story worthy – by whatever criteria – and not on the basis the literary genre it supposedly occupies.

All of which is to say: Happy birthday, HPL! Whether you're a writer of fantasy, horror, or science fiction, your works have immeasurably enriched my life and I am glad to have discovered them.