The Lovecraftian Poe: Essays on Influence, Reception, Interpretation, and Transformation ed. by Sean Moreland (review)

Lehigh University Press has published a new book in the Perspectives on Edgar Allan Poe Series. Edited by Sean Moreland, The Lovecraftian Poe comprises essays on various subjects from the creative writings of Edgar Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft to film adaptations of their works, and these essays shed light on the ways in which Poe influenced his successor Lovecraft, who has, in turn, shaped "how many modern readers approach, understand, and appreciate Poe" (Moreland xvii). That Lovecraft revered Poe is common knowledge. This veneration was not, however, sycophantic, as the contributors to Moreland's collection suggest. Wrestling with his forebear's influence, "Lovecraft transformed Poe's writings," wherein he found themes and devices that he refashioned inside the workshop of his genius (Moreland xvi). Following Lovecraft's death in 1937, artists continued this process, providing fresh insights into the textual legacy of Poe, whose works live anew through the creations of others who see the author of "The Raven" through the alembic of Lovecraft's genius. For Moreland and his colleagues, this complicated web of influences demands further scrutiny; The Lovecraftian Poe is, therefore, a response to the "dearth of critical work" dedicated to the Lovecraft/Poe connection (Moreland xv).

This connection is on display in the first four chapters, most of which feature detailed analyses of Poe's and Lovecraft's writings. In Chapter 1, Brian Johnson identifies "Poe's influence as a topic of concern" in the work of Lovecraft, demonstrating that the Providence writer experienced some creative anxiety of the Bloomian sort (3). Through fascinating close readings of Lovecraft's letters, Johnson points out this tension, an agitation that finds literary expression in tales such as "The Outsider" and "The Rats in the Walls." Johnson cleverly interprets these stories as allegories in which characters contending with the past represent Lovecraft, whose "indebtedness to Poe" (6) disturbed the Rhode Islander while he sought "a unique authorial voice" (4). The following chapter also features allegorical readings. Here Dan Clinton identifies an undercurrent of meaning—to borrow a phrase from Poe—running through Lovecraft's "The Call of Cthulhu" and Poe's "Ligeia," tales that are more than mere horror yarns: the latter story "dramatiz[es] Poe's ideas of literary effect" (34), and the former tale exhibits Lovecraft's belief that "aesthetic instincts" derive from "primitive customs and conditions" (33). Cloudy prose fogs up the opening and closing sections of this essay, and Clinton makes the strange claim that Poe, the writer of "Alone" and "William Wilson," was uninterested in "the formative experiences of childhood" (27). That remark would certainly have surprised Marie Bonaparte and Kenneth Silverman. Nevertheless, Clinton's investigation of the ways that Poe and his American successor "trace literary effects to enduring features of human perception" is arresting in its originality (27). Similarities between Poe's and Lovecraft's fictional treatments of race is the subject of Chapter 3, wherein Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock asserts that Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym and At the Mountains of Madness, a Lovecraft novel inspired by Pym, express contempt for nonwhites while challenging conceptions of racial difference dear to white supremacists. Analyzing Poe's portrayals of the natives of Tsalal as well as Lovecraft's descriptions of the shoggoths, prehistoric creatures that signify racial otherness, Weinstock concludes that the two writers, both of whom uttered unsavory opinions on race, nevertheless could imagine that "racial difference" is a cultural illusion concealing fundamental similarities that connect all humans (52). Weinstock overstates when he writes that Pym, a novel with an unreliable narrator, "cannot be read as other than a racist text" (58), but he rightly discerns an ambivalence about racial difference that Poe and Lovecraft share. In Chapter 4, Michael Cisco deems Kant, not Burke, the purveyor of the sublimity associated with the "cosmic horror" that fascinated Poe and Lovecraft as storytellers, but the essay is thin on commentary that would help...