Storyworlds across Media: Toward a Media-Conscious Narratology

15 The Developing Storyworld of H. P. Lovecraft

332 15 The Developing Storyworld of H. P. Lovecraft van leavenworth This chapter investigates the storyworld that has developed out of terror tropes presented in the fiction of American Gothic writer H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937). The Lovecraft storyworld is elicited by textual fiction, interactive fiction, short and feature-length films, fan art, comics, music, board games, role-playing games, computer games, and interactive environments in Second Life, to name a few examples. Specifically, I explore the poetics of the Lovecraft storyworld’s development, its transmedial adaptability, and its cultural significance for both contemporary audiences and Lovecraft’s legacy. The Lovecraft storyworld is different from other storyworlds in that it is not unified by a specific story or stories. Although there is no accepted definition across disciplinary boundaries, in narrative theory storyworlds are frequently defined as “worlds evoked by narratives,” which means that narratives act “as blueprints for world-creation” (Herman vii). For example, a reader’s mental construction of the environment, characters, and actions presented in Margaret Atwood’s A Handmaid’s Tale is a storyworld, as is the more comprehensive “world” of characters and events fostered by reading J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy. In this definition, the logical consistency of a story or interrelated stories is central; Offred always experiences painful subjugation in the Handmaid’s Tale storyworld and Frodo always bears the ring in the Lord of the Rings storyworld. But fictional practice is not always narratively consistent, particularly when several different authors and producers engage with a storyworld’s original “blueprint” narrative(s) over a long period of time. In such a case, the storyworld may develop contradictions or lose narrative consistency altogether. However, such alterations do not discount the possibility of a storyworld, as is demonstrated by the “multiverse” of parallel storyworlds used to logically account for narrative contradictions in long-running superhero comics (Kukkonen Developing Storyworld of Lovecraft 333 40). The Lovecraft storyworld provides a further example of how narrative inconsistencies may be accommodated. Rather than rely on story , the Lovecraft storyworld is logically consistent due to factors that derive from the original blueprint narrative(s) but are not dependent upon their presence. The Lovecraft storyworld is a shared mental model of an indistinct world that is unified by a specific thematic focus. Conceiving of this denarrativized storyworld involves imagining the fuzzy idea of a “world” created when audiences collectively share their experiences of it.1 Lisbeth Klastrup and Susana Tosca’s notion of transmedial worlds, although used primarily to discuss authorized cyberworld design, provides a helpful lens for examining the Lovecraft storyworld. “Transmedial worlds are abstract content systems from which a repertoire of fictional stories and characters can be actualized or derived across a variety of media forms. What characterises a transmedial world is that audience and designers share a mental image of the ‘worldness’ (a number of distinguishing features of its universe). The idea of a specific world’s worldness mostly originates from the first version of the world presented, but can be elaborated and changed over time” (n. pag.). This definition helpfully avoids the comprehensive uniformity and narrative consistency that the term “world” might suggest. Audiences and creators share an idea of “worldness,” of things that contribute to a sense of a world, rather than a distinct image of a world, and this world-like image has the potential to develop with each new aesthetic work that evokes it. In the Lovecraft storyworld, recurring scenarios feature human characters in realistic settings who discover coexisting cosmic realities and the unspeakably scary beings that inhabit them. These realities appear to rupture natural laws and cannot be conceived of by human minds, and so the encounters produce terror, eternal unease, and/or mental instability in the protagonists. The characters are left with a sense of the insignificance of humanity in the cosmos. These unifying elements provide the thematic foundation of the Lovecraft storyworld’s worldness—namely, its logical consistency. Although the theme of humanity’s hopeless encounter with an indifferent cosmic reality is the cornerstone of the Lovecraft storyworld, recurring beings, locations, and occult tomes may help to conjure it. Examples include not only minor creatures such as Byakhees and Mi- 334 Leavenworth gos but also inconceivable, masterful, alien entities such as Cthulhu, Hastur, or Azathoth; such locations as decaying towns or settlements in New England; and the Necronomicon, the most famous occult tome.2 However...