H.P. Lovecraft

This week I read The Unnamable and What The Moon Brings by H.P. Lovecraft. Fitting in the category of New Weird, we can see differences from classic horror. Instead of huge scary beasts that jump out or seek revenge, New Weird brings mystery and some psychology into play, we are not sure what we are seeing. is it real or in our minds? And if it’s in our minds, what does that mean?

            In Lovecraft’s What The Moon Brings, we are presented with an eerie atmosphere. The protagonist right away tells us that the moon scares him, letting us know that perhaps while he is walking along, his mind is agitated and uneasy; he’s not thinking rationally.  Then he sees dead faces in the flowers, leering up at him. Are there really faces there? When he describes the water he is painting a picture for us: the moon rippling in the shallow water. He explains this terrible something under the water waiting to grab him, but that thing is not really informative and Lovecraft allows us to create our own monster in our minds; he leaves it up to us. This allows us to see what we personally think is scary and in turn creates a larger emotional impact and reaction.

            The Unnamable does something very similar. But instead of leaving it completely up to the reader to decide what the creature may be, the protagonist describes what the specter looks like and talks about the lore to his friend. After a while his companion gets to thinking about the ghost, which is where the mystery comes in. After the attack, the protagonist is unable to tell what had happened because he had fainted right away and we do not know for sure what the friend saw, though he says it was the ghost they had talked about earlier. There is no way for the reader to know for sure because we know those thoughts were in his head and he was paranoid. This allows us to speculate and decide for ourselves if what had happened was a ghost or something not so supernatural.