ยป From Tales of H.P. Lovecraft, selected and edited by Joyce Carol Oates (pp. 1-6)
This short story marks my very first introduction to the writing of H.P. Lovecraft. So far, I’m tremendously impressed.
My desire to experience Lovecraft began when I read Neil Gaiman’s “A Study in Emerald” (available online as a pdf file, in the most gorgeous and effective layout I’ve ever seen.) Of course I knew that he, along with Poe, was pretty much the master of the classic horror genre, but I didn’t think of myself as a fan of horror. Then I read Sarah Monette’s The Bony Key. It turned all my expectations on their heads, and reminded me that John Bellairs’s children’s gothic novels were favourites when I was growing up. When I started my personal Fantasy Classics Challenge, I knew at least one Lovecraft short story collection had to make the list.
But where to start? Lovecraft has so many stories, some sharing a particular universe, others standing alone. Which of the many collections available would give me the best introduction? Serendipity came to my rescue when my favourite used bookstore got quite a few remaindered copies of Tales of H.P. Lovecraft, a 1997 collection edited by Joyce Carol Oates. I glanced over the table of contents and introduction, and noted that the stories were selected with new readers like me in mind. Perfect. I snapped up a copy.
The Outsider is only 6 pages long, and so doesn’t have much plot to speak of. Instead, Lovecraft creates an atmosphere so thick you can almost taste it, breathe it in. A nameless narrator has grown up entirely alone in an ancient and desolate castle, a place entirely surrounded and overshadowed by trees, which block out the sky and cast the place into a permanent, gloomy twilight. Reading Lovecraft’s description, I could almost feel the hideous castle—both its physical mass and the weight of all its years—pressing down on me. It seemed no wonder at all that the narrator would feel oppressed, choked, stifled by it, and long to escape somehow into the light and open air he saw pictured in the books that were his only connection to the outside world.
Lovecraft sketched out an entire world, albeit a small one, within only a few pages. Not what it looked like, or its history, but how it felt, the essence of the place. I don’t know yet what he’ll be able to do in a longer story, with greater scope for plot, characterization, and world-building—but I’m excited to find out.
